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LECTUEES 



ON THE 



ill 



HISTOHY OF FEANCE. 



BY THE RIGHT HONORABLE 

SIE JAMES STEPHEN, K.C.B., LL.J)., 

PEOFBSSOK OF MODERN HISTORY IN TOE UNIVERSITY OF 
CAMBRIDGE. 



NEW YORK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
82CLIFFSTK,BET. , 

1852, 



TO 



THE REV. WILLIAM WHEWELL, D.D., 

MASTER OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 

My dear Sir, — 

I SHOULD be sorely embarrassed if it were necessary 
for me, in dedicating this book to you, to attempt an 
imitation of that lapidary style in which Dryden and 
his contemporaries were accustomed to lay their works 
at the feet of their patrons. I could with almost equal 
ease present myself at your hospitable lodge at Trinity, 
in a coat embroidered like that in which Dryden, when 
in statu pupillari there, may have waited on the Mas- 
ter of his days. Perhaps, indeed, neither our language 
nor our appearance has really been improved by the 
exchange of the habits of our ancestors for those now 
in use among us. But, at present, I gladly avail my- 
self of the unceremonious fashions of our age to ad- 
dress you, not in a formal inscription, but in a familiar 
letter, since in such a letter I shall best be able to pur- 
sue that discursive course which will, I foresee, be nec- 
essary for bringing under your notice some of the many 
topics to which I am desirous to refer. 

When, in the summer of 1849, her majesty was 
pleased to appoint me to be her Professor of Modern 
History at Cambridge, I consulted three, and three 
only, of my friends, as to the means by which I could 
most effectually discharge the duties of my office, ap- 
prising each of them that the History of France was 
the subject on which I first proposed to enter. ''In 
that case," answered Mr. John Austin (from whose 
company no man ever returned without a fuller mind 
and a warmer heart), " your business will be to ex- 



IV DEDICATORY LETTER. 



plain the institutions of the old French monarchy. 
There are no questions connected with the history of 
that country which so readily admit, or which so much 
require, illustration from a lecturer." Mr. Macaulay's 
answer was, in substance, that of all the fields of 
French History, that of the wars of religion was the 
richest and the least exhausted ; hut he added that no 
man could be competent to take possession publicly of 
that, or any other wide subject of historical inquiry, 
without a preliminary silence, and a particular prep- 
aration of at least two or three years. By yourself I 
was told that the arrangements so recently made for 
the better conduct of our academical studies and ex- 
aminations proceeded on the assumption that the pub- 
lic duties of my own office would be undertaken and 
performed without delay; that the abandonment of 
them, even for a single year, would defeat one essen- 
tial part of the general scheme, and would involve the 
rest in confusion ; and that, therefore, the interest of 
the University required that I should do my best at 
once, and that I might do it with a good hope of a 
kind and indulgent acceptance of the endeavor. 

If I had consulted either my ease or my credit, I 
should have been guided by Mr. Macaulay's advice. 
But I soon became convinced that it was my duty 
rather to defer to Mr. Austin's opinion and to yours. 
I therefore delivered, in Easter Term, 1850, the first 
twelve Lectures contained in the accompanying vol- 
ume. In Easter Term, 1851, I added to them the re- 
maining twelve. 

I anticipate your answer, that thus far I have been 
explaining why I lectured prematurely; but that what 
is really wanting is rather a defense for my now pub- 
lishing precipitately. To render my apology on that 
head intelligible, you must allow me, in sea phrase, to 
take a good offing. 



DEDICATORY LETTER. 



In the year 1812 I ceased to be an under-graduate, 
and at once became so deeply immersed in the active 
business of life at London, that when, after an interval 
of thirty-eight years, I returned to Cambridge, it was 
a scene in which I found almost all the interest of 
perfect novelty. Most of the venerable old buildings 
were indeed standing, and among the occupants of 
them I could still recognize some few of my old college 
contemporaries. But I soon ascertained that the revo- 
lutionary spirit, which is so active in our courts and 
Parliaments, was not less wakeful in our collegiate 
halls and cloisters. 

If I had the pen of Edward Gibbon, I could draw 
from my own early experience a picture which would 
form no unmeet companion for that which he has be- 
queathed to us of his education at Oxford. The three 
or four years during which I lived on the banks of the 
Cam were passed in a very pleasant, though not a very 
cheap hotel. But if they had been passed at the 
Clarendon, in Bond Street, I do not think that the ex- 
change would have deprived me of any aids for intel- 
lectual discipline, or for acquiring literary or scientific 
knowledge. 

But in 1849 I discovered that not only those ancient 
under-graduate liberties were overthrown, but that 
even the tradition and memorial of them had passed 
away. They had given place to innovations which 
would have made the hair stand on end on those ven- 
erable wigs which were worn by the "heads of houses" 
in my time. All the old text-books in science and in 
literature had been superseded. All the public exam- 
inations had altered their character. Studies unheard 
of in the first decade of the present century were either 
occupying or contending for a foremost place in our 
system of instruction. All our academical statutes 
had undergone or were undergoing revision. Reform- 



vi DEDICATORY LETTER. 

atory enactments had succeeded each other in such 
number and with such rapidity as to exercise severe- 
ly the skill of the most practiced interpreter of the law. 
Every principle of education, however well establish- 
ed, and every habit of teaching, however inveterate, 
had been fearlessly questioned, and not seldom laid 
aside. And presiding over all this movement I found 
one dominant mind, informed by such an accumula- 
tion of knowledge and experience as might have be- 
come a patriarch, and yet animated by such indomita- 
ble hopefulness and vivacity as might have been sup- 
posed to be the exclusive privilege of boyhood. 

In the contemplation of all these changes, my chief 
solicitude, of course, was to ascertain what were the 
particular duties which had devolved on myself I 
found that I was not only expected, like my predeces- 
sors, to read public lectures on Modern History, but 
that I was also to conduct examinations on that sub- 
ject, sometimes alone, and sometimes in concert with 
others — alone in the case of pupils who, being unam- 
bitious of honorary distinctions, might seek merely to 
obtain from me a certificate of their acquaintance with 
some one or two particular historical books ; in con- 
cert with others in the case of candidates for rank and 
honor among the students of the moral sciences. 

I will not conceal from you that I regarded, and 
still regard, with some regret, my share in this appor- 
tionment of labor; not, indeed, that I consider it either 
as onerous or unequal, but that I am constrained to 
view it as of very doubtful utility. 

Within the compass of the " moral sciences" em- 
braced in these examinations are included Moral Phi- 
losophy, English Law, General Jurisprudence, Modern 
History, and Political Economy, Our honorary dis- 
tinctions are to be awarded for proficiency, not in any 
one of these pursuits alone, but in them all collective- 



DEDICATORY LETTER. VU 



ly. The candidates for such distinctions must, until 
within a month or two of their examination, have con- 
tinued to prosecute those scientific, literary, and the- 
ological studies, in which the entire body of our pupils 
are engaged throughout the whole of their academical 
course. To myself, therefore, it seems simply impos- 
sible that they should really be conversant with even 
any one of the five moral sciences in question. A 
young man who, under such circumstances, should 
really be conversant with them all, might read the 
life of the admirable Crichton without incredulity and 
without despair. 

We shall, however, from year to year, propose ques- 
tions on all of those subjects, and we shall, undoubted- 
ly, receive many ingenious and specious answers to 
them. I, for one, shall read such answers with re- 
gret ; for if there be any one habit of mind which I 
should especially desire to discourage in men entering 
into the business of life, it is the habit of substituting 
a shabby plausibility for sound knowledge ; and how 
can we avoid promoting that disingenuous and per- 
nicious practice when we invite the aspirants to dis- 
tinction among us to submit themselves to an exam- 
ination in sciences which we have not allowed them 
time to investigate or to understand ? For example, 
let any one who ever devoted himself to the study of 
the law of England say whether a few brief intersti- 
tial hours, stolen with difficulty from his indispensable 
academical pursuits, will enable a young man, in his 
twenty-first or twenty-second year, to know any thing 
worth the knowing of that boundless, and toilsome, 
and ever-shifting field of inquiry. Yet an adroit and 
dexterous man may, even under such circumstances, 
assume the deceptive semblance of such knowledge. 
I could, therefore, earnestly have wished that each 
candidate for distinction in the moral sciences had 



Viii DEDICATORY LETTER. 

been permitted to choose some one such, science to 
which alone his examination was to he confined, and 
had also been first discharged from his classical and 
mathematical labors during a period sufficiently long 
to enable him to pursue it below the mere surface. 

My duty, however, being to obey the law as I found 
it, I applied myself to discover how such obedience 
could be most effectually rendered. The result was, 
to disclose to me some formidable and hardly antici- 
pated difficulties. Thus I learned, that of the gentle- 
men whom I was to instruct and to examine, a con- 
siderable portion had no acquaintance with any mod- 
ern language except their own, and that the most pop- 
ular and elementary French works on the History of 
France were apparently unknown to a still greater 
number of them. Among such of them with whom 
I conversed, I found, therefore, an almost unanimous 
solicitude to be directed to some English book on the 
subject of French history, by the aid of which they 
might prepare themselves for what was to be taught 
in the lecture-room. 

I need not remind you that the only such books are 
Robertson's " Introduction to the History of Charles 
v.," and the first volume of Mr. Hallam's " View of 
the State of Europe during the Middle Ages," or rather 
so much of that volume as is contained in its first and 
second chapters. The second of those chapters so com- 
pletely answered the demand of my pupils, that, in 
the fifth of the following Lectures, I referred them to 
it and to Robertson as their guides on every question 
connected with the French Feudal System. But the 
first of Mr. Hallam's chapters, which contains an epit- 
ome of the history of France from its conquest by 
Clovis to the invasion of Naples by Charles VHI., was 
not equally suited to my immediate purpose ; for my 
plan embraced inquiries extending far beyond the 



DEDICATORY LETTER. IX 

reign of Charles VIII., and the very circumstance 
which constitutes the beauty and excellence of that 
passage of the " View of the State of Europe during 
the Middle Ages" — I mean the wonderful art with 
-which a narrative so luminous and so comprehensive 
is compressed into so small a space — though befitting 
it for higher ends, unfits it for serving as a class or 
lecture book. Mr. Hallam every where presupposes in 
his readers an extent and a variety of previous inform- 
ation which it was impossible for me to ascribe to the 
great majority of my youthful audience. 

I found, therefore, that, in order to teach the His- 
tory of France, I must begin by drawing up an intro- 
duction to it, with the omission of the whole subject 
of the feudal system, on which Mr. Hallam had left 
me nothing material to say. I sought, however, dili- 
gently at Paris, during a residence of several months 
there, for any book, a translation of which might re- 
lieve me from the labor of composing, and from the 
risk of publishing, such an introduction. Finding no 
such book, I performed that labor, as I now incur that 
risk. 

It has, indeed, been suggested to me that an annual 
recitation of my lectures would supersede the necessity 
of sending them to the press. My answer is, that, aft- 
er once making the experiment, I have renounced the 
hope of being ever able to repeat the same discourses 
year after year. I must venture to add, that I am 
extremely skeptical as to the real value of public oral 
teaching on such a subject as mine. If Abelard him- 
self were living now, I believe that he would address 
his instructions, not to the ears of thousands crowding 
round his chair, but to the eyes of myriads reading 
them in studious seclusion. 

I trust, therefore, that, in publishing this book with- 
out farther delay, I am really acting in the spirit of 



DEDICATORY LETTER. 



that advice for which I am indebted to you. In the 
early delivery and in the early publication of my Lec- 
tures, my object has been the same. It has been in 
either case to meet an exigency for which I am bound, 
to the best of my power, to provide, and for which I 
knew not how otherwise to make provision. 

I trust, also, that I have been regardless of Mr. 
Macaulay's admonition in appearance rather than in 
reality. Such rapidity of execution would, indeed, be 
altogether absurd, if, in giving this volume to the 
world, I were a candidate for a place in that small and 
illustrious company of historical writers to which he 
and Mr. Hallam belong. But to disclaim any such 
pretension would not be so much superfluous as it 
would be ludicrous. 

In the few prefatory words with which I opened 
these Lectures at Cambridge, and which I have no 
means of quoting except from memory, I remember to 
have said to the senior members of the University, who 
had done me the honor to attend on that occasion, that 
I had nothing to offer which invited or which would 
reward their attention ; for that, having expected to 
address myself to those, and to those only, to whom 
Modern History was an almost untrodden field, I had 
prepared nothing which was not perfectly simple, fa- 
miliar, and elementary. The Lectures which, in ac- 
cordance with that announcement, I then proceeded 
to deliver, and which I now publish, constitute neither 
a history, nor a series of historical treatises, but merely 
a class or lecture book for the use of the students of 
our University. I entirely disclaim for them any more 
ambitious character. I have entertained no hidier 
design than that of laying before my pupils what I 
suppose to be an accurate summary of the actual state 
of a particular branch of the science I have to teach. 
I have not undertaken to enlarge the limits of that 



DEDICATORY LETTER. XI 

science. I have not passed over, nor have I thought 
myself at liberty to pass over, in silence, any material 
fact, or any important consideration, merely because 
it may have been adduced by some, or repeated by 
many, before me. Of those who may turn over these 
pages, not a few may perhaps, therefore, find in them 
no material addition to their antecedent stock of knowl- 
edge ; but to those whom I have undertaken to instruct, 
and for whom alone I have written, I have good reason 
to believe that a very large part of what they will find 
in this volume will have the attraction of novelty. 
^ In making this statement, I have no design to de- 
preciate or to disparage my own labors. An histo- 
rian aims at one kind of praise, a lecturer at another. 
It was no reproach to our great grammarian, Roger 
Ascham, that he did not teach such lessons as our 
great critic Richard Bentley afterward taught. The 
lectures which in former days you delivered to your 
pupils on some of the inductive sciences were, I pre- 
sume, far less profound and original than the history 
which you have given to the learned world at large, 
of those sciences collectively. 

Neither do I design to represent this book as a com- 
pilation. The plan of it, at least, is my own. In the 
execution of that plan I have declined no labor, mental 
or bodily, which I have been able to sustain. I have 
examined all the authorities, original and secondary, 
to which it has been in my power to refer, and I have 
diligently meditated every result to which those in- 
vestigations have appeared to me to lead. Having 
done so, I have freely availed myself of the aids which 
I have been able to derive from many of the great au- 
thors of France. To have declined such aid was not, 
I think, permitted to me ; for I am well assured that no 
teacher who has not, like them, devoted a long course 
of laborious years to the investigation of their national 



Xii DEDICATORY LETTER. 

archives, could habitually substitute his own conclu- 
sions for theirs, without sacrificing the interest of his 
pupils to the mere vanity of authorship. 

The motives which forbade the great lecturers of 
our times, MM. Guizot, Schlegel, and Fauriel, and 
their more humble followers, from referring to the au- 
thorities for every fact which they had occasion to 
state, have compelled me to follow their example. I 
have, however, referred to most of the writers whom 
I have chiefly employed. Yet there is one omission 
which I am anxious to take this opportunity of sup- 
plying. I allude to the work of M. de Choiseul — 
Daillecourt on the Crusades — a book far less known 
than it deserves to be in England, or, as I should in- 
fer, even in France itself. Having the surest grounds 
for concluding that he is the best of all existing guides 
on that subject (vast as is the multitude by whom it 
has been recently handled), I have followed him with 
a confidence which has been increased by every test 
to which I have been able to subject the accuracy of 
his statements and quotations. 

I fear that I shall appear to have been almost as 
forgetful of Mr. Austin's counsels as of those of Mr. 
Macaulay ; for though, in deference to them, I have 
endeavored to illustrate the municipal, the judicial, 
the noble, the sacerdotal, the fiscal, and the representa- 
tive institutions of the old French monarchy, yet I 
have much more often and more largely deviated into 
topics of a more popular kind. But a brief experience 
convinced me that, to pursue the subject of those in- 
stitutions into all their ramifications and details, and 
to render such discussions interesting to my young au- 
dience, it would have been necessary for me to possess 
all Mr. Austin's boundless acquaintance with the his- 
tory of France, vivified by an imagination as rich and 
as sleepless as that of Mr. Macaulay. I doubt not that 



DEDICATORY LETTER. Xlii 

my successors will have to address themselves to pupils 
prepared to follow them into the most arid fields of his- 
torical investigation. In the present times, I believe 
that the choice must be made between habitually- 
handling topics of more general interest and speaking 
to empty benches. 

As you frequently condescended, and sometimes at 
no small personal inconvenience, to afford me your 
support and countenance by taking a seat among 
my auditors, you may, perhaps, observe that my Lec- 
tures, as they are now printed, differ in some re- 
spects from those which were actually spoken. In 
general they are unaltered, the words, as well as the 
substance, being to a very great extent retained. But 
with a view to perspicuity, I have in many places 
changed the arrangement, and have added passages 
which I could not have pronounced in my lecture- 
room without violating that wholesome law or cus- 
tom which requires every lecturer among us to close 
his discourse as soon as his hour-glass shall have run 
out its sands. 

Such are the circumstances under which I have 
written, and now publish, this book, and commend it 
to your protection. I have long since thought that 
the stories which we learned in our nurseries to the 
prejudice of the giants must have been so many cal- 
umnies ; for, in the whole of my intercourse with 
mankind, I have perceived that a man's willingness 
to be pleased, his indulgence to every honest attempt 
to be either useful or agreeable, and his talent for de- 
tecting something admirable or praiseworthy in what- 
ever he reads or hears, are in exact proportion to his 
own intellectual stature. I therefore present this 
book to you, quite at ease as to the spirit in which 
you will receive and criticise it; and without even 
soliciting your indulgent kindness, because experience 



XIV DEDICATORY LETTER. 

has taught me how largely and spontaneously it flows 
toward every one who stands in need of it, 

I am, my dear sir, most truly yours. 

James Stephen. 

Richmond-on-Thames, October, 1851. 



CONTENTS. 



LECTUEE I. 
On the Decline and Fall of the Romano-Gallic Province Page 1 

LECTURE 11. 
On the Decline and Fall of the Merovingian Dynasty 29 

LECTURE III. 
On the Character and Influence of Charlemagne 58 

LECTURE IV. 
On the Decline and Fall of the Carlovingian Dynasty 83 

LECTURE V. 
On the Anti-feudal Influence of the Municipahties of France. ... 107 

LECTURE VI. 
On the Anti-feudal Influence of the Eastern Crusades 135 

LECTURE VII. 
On the Anti-feudal Influence of the Albigensian Crusades. ..... 157 

LECTURE VIII. 
On the Influence of the Judicial on the Monarchical System of 
France 190 

LECTURE IX. 
On the Influence of the Privileged Orders on the Monarchy of 
France 229 

LECTURE X. 
On the States-General of the Fourteenth Century 252 

LECTURE XL 
On the States-General of the Fifteenth Century 281 



XVI CONTENTS. 

LECTURE XII. 
Oil the States-General of the Sixteenth Century Page 319 

LECTURE XIII. 
On the Sources and Management of the Revenues of France 349 

LECTURE XIV. 
On the Power of the Purse in France 369 

LECTURE XV. 
On the Reformation and the Wars of Religion 404 

LECTURE XVI. 
On the Refonnation and the Wars of Religion 431 

LECTURE XVII. 
On the Power of the Pen in France 460 

LECTURE XVIII. 
On the Power of the Pen in France 501 

LECTURE XIX. 
On the Power of the Pen in France 527 

LECTURE XX. 
On the Absolute Monarchy as administered by Henry IV. and by 
Richelieu 562 

LECTURE XXL 
On the Absolute Monarchy during the Minority of Louis XIV. . . 586 

LECTURE XXII. 
On the Absolute Monarchy as administered by Colbert and Lou- 
vois 610 

LECTURE XXIII. 

On the Absolute Monarchy as administered by Louis XIV. in 
Person €52 

LECTURE XXIV. 
The Growth of the French and the English Monarchies compared 685 



LECTURES. 

LECTURE L 

ON THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMANO-GALLIC PEOVINCE. 

In the discourse which precedes and introduces his lectures 
on Modern History, my immediate predecessor has, with char- 
acteristic perspicuity, stated and resolved the problem how his 
labors might best be rehdered conducive to the advancement 
of his pupils. He states himself to have declined, as imprac- 
ticable, the plan of entering into the details of any historical 
narrative. He informs us that, having at first indulged, he 
ultimately abandoned, the hope of exhibiting an estimate and 
summary of the workings of our common nature on the theatre 
of the civilLzed world in recent times. He appears to have at 
one time entertained, and afterward to have rejected, the de- 
sign of passing in review various historical epochs, and of ex- 
amining into the relations which they severally bore to each 
other. Finally, we learn that, after revolving the utility of 
each of these projects, he at length adopted the conclusion that 
he should most effectually improve those whom he had under- 
taken to instruct, by teaching them, not what the history of 
the world actually had been, but rather by what methods, with 
what views, and under the guidance of what teachers, that his- 
tory ought to be studied. 

Pursuing this design, Mr. Smythe proceeded to show by co- 
pious illustrations how history might be rescued from barren 
details, and from generalities no less barren, and might be con- 
verted into a practical doctrine and a nutritive science. He 
proposed and investigated several of the great questions to 
which it gives birth, and instructed his pupils by what con- 
duct of the understanding similar problems might be elicited 
from the chronicles of past times, and might be resolved by 

A. 



2 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

the moral and political sciences of the times m which we live. 
He proceeded to recommend various courses of reading, adapt- 
ed to the different lines of research in which his hearers might 
ultimately engage, and measured hy the leisure, whether more 
or less considerable, which they might be able to bestow on the 
prosecution of them. He then indicated, with force and brev- 
ity, and with a candor no less generous than intrepid, what 
were the merits, and what the defects, of the various authors 
to whom they would have occasion to refer. 

G-reat as are the obligations which Mr. Smythe has thus con- 
ferred on the University, and on the world of letters at large, 
an especial debt of gratitude is due to him from myself as his 
successor ; for he has relieved me from many arduous duties, 
which, without his aid, it would have been incumbent on me 
to undertake. Assuming, and not, I trust, erroneously assum- 
ing, that every one who shall enter on that course of study to 
which I am about to direct you, will have first carefully pos- 
sessed himself of the substance of Mr. Smythe's lectures, I am 
able to advance at once to the accomplishment of the design 
which I have myself projected, and to which (as indeed to aU 
inquiries into the history of modern times) his writings contain 
an invaluable introduction. 

To a great extent, though not perhaps entirely, I concur in 
my predecessor's opinion, that it would be impossible to deliv- 
er from this Chair a connected narrative of any series of his- 
torical events. But, on the other hand, he by whom this Chair 
is occupied will address his hearers to no useful purpose unless 
they shall possess some accurate knowledge of those events to 
which he will have occasion to refer. Thus, it will be my en- 
deavor to explain the relation which some of the greater occur- 
rences in the civilized world bear to each other and to the per- 
manent springs of human action. But to those who may be 
ignorant of those occurrences, every such explanation must be 
merely empirical. The philosophy of History must be no bet- 
ter than so much unprofitable dogmatism to him who does not 
know what are the facts of history. Truth wiU never exert 
her vital and prolific energy except in minds which have ac- 
cumulated, digested, and arranged the premises from which 
truth is to be inferred. 

But, though general principles, whether political, social, or 



THE ROMANO- GAL Lie PROVINCE. d 

economical, will he dormant and barren in him who is unac- 
quainted with the premises from which they are deduced, yet 
an exact knowledge of those premises will often he salient as 
a spring of truth, and germinant as a seed of truth, in him to 
whom those prmciples have never heen formally propounded. 
Just as an extensive intercourse with mankind will teach us 
more of the offices of daily life than we can learn from the 
most assiduous of our solitary meditations, so we may often 
gather from naked historical narratives more and deeper les- 
sons of wisdom than we can derive from any abstracted his- 
torical philosophy. This is especially true of such narratives 
as render us the spectators and associates of those who in for- 
mer times took a conspicuous part in the great dramatic action 
of the civilized world. The reader of Froissart or of Philip de 
Comines is introduced into a society, every member and every 
vicissitude of which tacitly inculcates some affecting or some 
weighty admonition ; and the least acute observer, when placed 
in a scene so glowing with form and color, and so quickened 
by ceaseless movement and vitality, becomes to a great extent 
his own teacher. With no monitor instructing us how to draw 
inferences from such books, we draw them almost unconsciously 
for ourselves, and therefore easily apprehend, and cherish, and 
retain them. 

The candidates for the honorary distinctions which are 
henceforth to reward proficiency in historical learning among 
us, will have another and more obvious, if not a more weighty, 
reason for studying the occurrences which connect the various 
epochs of history with each other ; for all public examinations 
must, as far as possible, point at what is most absolute, defi- 
nite, and certain in our knowledge. An examination in histo- 
ry should therefore (as I conceive) relate far more to such facts 
(and there are many such) as admit of no reasonable doubt, 
than to any philosophical theories, which, however just or pro- 
found, can hardly be exempt from some infusion of error. 

What, then, are those series of facts, or what those passages 
of history, of which it will be necessary that, for the present, 
such candidates should possess themselves ? Assuredly not 
the whole of the various sequences of political events which 
have occurred in all of the nations of the civilized world since 
the subversion of the Roman empire — not (that is) the entire 



4 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

compass of Modern History. An undertaking of sucxi mag- 
nitude would require of those who should embark in it the 
abandonment of those classical and scientific pursuits to which 
(as I rejoice to perceive) the Senate has reserved their ancient 
and rightful supremacy among us. 

But, though compelled to decline so vast and so ambitious 
an enterprise, may we not direct the student, first, to some 
synopsis of the whole range of the history of modern times, 
and then to some abbreviated course of reading, which shall 
enable him to verify and to apprecia,te it for himself? Many 
writers in France, in Grermany, and in England have taken 
such a survey of the state and progress of Christendom during 
the last few centuries. Such, indeed (though incidentally and 
indirectly), was one of the tasks which Mr. Smythe proposed 
to himsejf, and partly executed. Why not follow so eminent 
and so successful an example ? 

The answer is, that such historical outlines were drawn by 
Mr. Smythe, and by others, for purposes essentially different 
from those which I am bound to keep in view. Their design 
was either to prepare the future students of ancient chroni- 
cles and records for the journey awaiting them, or to enable 
those who had actually performed that journey to methodize, 
to consolidate, and to revive the knowledge acquired in the 
progress of it. My design is to conduct and accompany my 
hearers through as large a part as we may be able to trav- 
erse of that laborious pilgrimage. If, without submitting our- 
selves to the fatigues and privations of the way, we should be 
satisfied to vault from one eminence to another, overleaping 
all that is wearisome in the intermediate distances, we should 
at best acquire but a slight and transient knowledge of the 
region over which we had passed, even though our flight across 
it had been upborne by the wit and sagacity of Voltaire, or by 
the far deeper and more comprehensive wisdom of Bossuet. 

Renouncing, therefore, both the hope of grasping the whole 
of Modern History in its details, and the scheme of reducing 
it into the form of a compendious summary, it remains that 
we select, as the subject of our inquiries, the annals of some 
one of the states which collectively compose the European or 
Christian commonwealth. The state best adapted for our pur- 
pose will be that which has maintained the most intimate and 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. O 

influential relations with the other members of that great fra- 
ternity. If there be any people whose history may fitly be 
compared to a main channel to which the histories of all other 
nations are tributary, or which resembles a range of highlands 
from which extensive and commanding views of all the adja- 
cent territories can be obtained, that narrative, at once so cen- 
tral and so eminent, will not only develop a connected series 
of events composing the corporate life or existence of one great 
people, but will unite and hold together mLTch of what we are 
most interested to know of the national life of the other states 
of the civilized world. In studying such a national story, we 
shall neither, on the one hand, be bewildered amid the intri- 
cacies and the multitude of incoherent incidents, nor, on the 
other hand, be hedged up within such narrow fences as to be 
excluded from an occasional survey of the simultaneous prog- 
ress of all the European sovereignties, from their original bar- 
barism to their actual civilization. 

There are natural feelings or prejudices which would pre- 
dispose us to regard our own land as forming such a centre of 
the political system to which it belongs. I believe, however, 
that the more deliberate judgment of us all will induce us rather 
to assign that distinction to France ; for, among the temporal 
powers of the Western world, monarchical France enjoyed the 
longest, if not the most abundant, possession of whatever con- 
stitutes national greatness ; such as unity and continuity of 
government, military power, loyalty and love of country, intel- 
lectual eminence, and skill in those social arts by which life is 
humanized and softened. In industry, and wealth, and com- 
merce, in the great science of ruling man, in the love and the 
right use of freedom, and especially of spiritual freedom, En- 
gland, indeed, has neither a superior nor a rival. In Northern 
Italy, it is true, art and science were approaching their merid- 
ian splendor, while France was yet scarcely emerging from 
mental darkness. The Grermanic body, it may be admitted, 
was already holding in check the papal despotism and pre- 
paring the way for the Reformation, and assuming its office 
of conservator of the national independence in Europe, before 
France had contributed any thing to the general interests of 
mankind, or had learned to understand or to prosecute her own. 
Yet, amid disasters so fearful and so protracted as no other 



6 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

people have endured in modern times, tlie French have, during 
the last six centuries, from causes to be hereafter noticed, been 
the arbiters of peace and war in Europe ; have borne to the 
other European states relations more intimate and more mul- 
tiplied than have been maintained by any other power with 
its neighbors ; have diffused their manners, their language, 
their literature, and their ideas even among the most zealous 
antagonists of their power ; and have irresistibly attracted the 
gaze, and not seldom the reluctant gaze, of all other people 
toward their policy, their institutions, and their wonderful suc- 
cession of actors on the stage of public life among them — of 
actors whom we occasionally love and not seldom abhor — 
whom we sometimes regard with admiration, but more often 
with amazement — whose biogi-aphies compose the greater part 
of the history of their nation — who have left no heights of virtue 
or of wisdom unsealed, no depths of guilt or folly unfathomed, 
and who exhibit in the strongest relief every conceivable va- 
riety of human character — unless, indeed, it be that they are 
unable to be dull. On the history of this great people I there- 
fore propose to enter. 

The eventful scene of which, during the last six thousand 
years, this world has been the theatre, when interpreted by 
the revelation which has been made to man of the divine coun- 
sels, may be viewed as a drama of which retribution is the law, 
opinion the chief agent, and the improvement and ultimate 
happiness of our race the appointed, though remote catastrophe. 
And, to pursue the image one step farther, the annals of each 
separate state may be considered as an under-plot, harmonizing 
with the general action, and conducing to its more complete 
development. With the progress of time, the power of opinion 
has continually increased, until in these latter days it has acted 
with a force, a consistency, and a perseverance altogether un- 
known in the earlier ages of the world. From our common 
Christianity, from the simultaneous condensation and diffu- 
sion of the ecclesiastical authority, from the art of printing, 
from the new facilities of intercoxirse between distant places, 
from the growth of great cities, of commerce, and of wealth, 
and from a wider intercommunity of laws and of legal cus- 
toms, have at length resulted a free interchange of thought, 
and a general concurrence of thought, to which mankind never 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 7 

before attained, and a consequent union among the chief mem- 
bers of the great human family to which mankind never before 
aspired. To trace out the progress of public opinion in mold- 
ing the character and the condition of the nations is the high- 
est office of History, and especially of Modern History. To 
indicate some of the stages of that progress in France is the 
arduous task w^hich I have ventured to propose to myself. 
How imperfectly it must be executed, within the contracted 
limits of the time assigned to me, it would be superfluous to 
explain. 

The history of the French people divides itself into three 
principal eras. The first embraces the long and tardy passage 
from the Roman despotism to the establishment of the abso- 
lute monarchy under Charles YIH. and his immediate success- 
ors. The second, commencing with the accession of that sov- 
ereign, and terminating with the age of Louis XIY., includes 
the period of the greatness and glories of that monarchy. The 
third, comprising the decline and fall of it, may be said to 
commence with the accession of Louis XV., and to be con- 
summated at the French Revolution of 1789. During the pres- 
ent term I shall confine myself to the two earliest of those 
eras. 

For your assistance in prosecuting these inquiries, I could 
much wish to indicate to you some history of France, in our 
own language, which rises above mediocrity ; or, indeed, to in- 
dicate any which does not fall below it. But I know of no 
such book. Even the great French historians of their native 
land, who flourished before our own times, are to be read cau- 
tiously and with much distrust, for they are arraigned as ig- 
norant, as faithless, or as narrow-minded by the most emi- 
nent of those writers in that country, who have, of late years, 
imparted to history a character so nearly approaching to that 
of the more exact moral sciences. 

The earliest of those who gave to the world a complete his- 
tory of France is Mezerai. His work was published exactly 
two hundred years ago. He makes no secret of his ignorance 
of the original sources of historical information, but avows 
himself to be a compiler from the compilations of others. He 
is to be studied rather as a commentator than as an historian, 
and is more to be admired for the courage with which he as- 



O THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

sumed and exercised in the reign of Louis XIV. a censorsMp 
on the former rulers of France, than for any accurate knowl- 
edge or profound appreciation of the course of events which he 
has related. 

After an interval of sixty years, Father Daniel, a Jesuit, 
undertook to penetrate into those deeper and more relnote 
springs of knowledge which Mezerai had neglected, and pro- 
duced a work of which the earlier part is of eminent value, and 
far superior to the rest. His merits as an antiquarian are uni- 
versally acknowledged. He is entitled to the still higher praise 
of heing among the earliest masters in modern times of what 
may be called the art of historical painting. But the more 
closely he approached his own age, the more both his knowl- 
edge and his impartiality declined. Having shown, in the 
commencement of his work, how history ought to be written, 
he showed, in the latter stages of it, how much the prejudices 
of a party and a profession may disqualify any one from being 
a judge of the conduct and the motives of the men of other 
days. 

At the distance of forty years, Father Daniel was succeed- 
ed by the Abbe Yelly, whose history of France was contin- 
ued by Yillaret, and afterward by G-arnier. This series, and 
especially the first part of it, once enjoyed a very high popu- 
larity, which it has still partly retained, although Yelly and 
Yillaret have gradually fallen in the estimation of the best 
judges. Yelly is charged by them with great ignorance of 
his subject and with reckless plagiarisms. The fascination 
which he once exercised is akin to that which has obtained a 
permanent place in literature for Pope's translation of the 
" Iliad." He excelled in those artifices of style by which the 
thoughts, the characters, and the imagery of remote times are 
embellished with the refinement and the graces of the age to 
which the writer belongs. His continuator Yillaret, on the 
other hand, was infected by an unfortunate taste for senti- 
mental and declamatory writing ; a habit in which he again 
was imitated by his follower G-arnier, who added to this mis- 
placed rhetoric the most wearisome prolixity in insignificant 
details. 

In the commencement of the present century, M. Anquetil 
published what is, in effect, little more than an abridgment — a 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 9 

very useful abridgment indeed — of the histories of Daniel, Yel- 
ly, Villaret, and G-arnier. 

M. de Sismondi followed. His profound acquaintance with 
all the original authorities ; his almost boundless learning ; the 
laborious fidelity with which he has conducted his inquiries 
and exhibited the results of them ; i. .id the occasional, though 
infrequent lights which his philosophy has enabled him to cast 
over the narrative in which he is engaged, elevate him far 
above all the French historians by whom he was preceded. It 
must be confessed, however, that his work is heavy and weari- 
some ; that his merits are rather those of an annalist than an 
historian ; that he is oppressed with the multitude and extent 
of his own materials, and is defective in the great arts of sub- 
ordinating the accessory to the principal incidents of his nar- 
rative, and of grouping characters and events into separate and 
definite masses. M. de Sismondi is, nevertheless, the writer 
to whom those who may accompany me in my proposed in- 
quiries should chiefly address themselves. There is, indee'd, at 
present, in the course of publication, a new history of France, 
by M. Henri Martin, which, however, is still incomplete, and 
with which I am but very slightly acquainted. A similar and 
much shorter work has been published by M. Michelet, of whom, 
in this place, I am unwilling to say any thing, because I am 
unable to characterise his writings except in terms which 
might seem to fail in the respect due to a living author who 
has long enjoyed much popularity, and to whom no one will 
deny the praise of eloquence and of learning. 

In thus suggesting M. de Sismondi's history to my hearers 
as a text-book, I am bound reluctantly to add, that his Repub- 
lican principles render him the stern, and not seldom the un- 
just, accuser of almost all those who ever administered the 
government of Monarchical France. His theological opinions, 
whatever they may be (for they are studiously kept out of 
sight), have made him an almost equally severe censor of all 
those to whom the Church has delegated the exercise not only 
of her usurped authority, but of her legitimate powers. M. 
de Sismondi's liberality is not seldom too active for his charity. 

Every one is probably aware that, in the unwrought mate- 
rials of her national history, the literature of France is rich 
beyond the competition of any other country. The researches 



10 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

of tlie Benedictines, the memoirs of tlie French Academy, with 
the various provincial histories, have left no part of the anti- 
quities unexplored ; while her chroniclers, such as Joinville 
and Froissart, and her writers of memoirs, such as Philip de 
Comines and Sully, are at once the inventors and almost the 
exclusive cultivators of a style of which it is scarcely possible 
to say whether it is more instructive or delightful. 

But I am aware that, to those who are engaged in our reg- 
ular course of academical studies, it is impossible to pursue an 
sxtensive course of reading in this or in any other department 
of modern history. For my immediate purpose, therefore, I 
content myself with referring you to a series of books, which, 
though not of very formidable extent, may collectively afford 
a sufficient survey of the history of France during the period 
to be embraced in the lectures which I propose to deliver dur- 
ing the present academical term. They are, 1st, Sismondi's 
History till the end of the reign of Louis XIV. ; 2d, the Abrege 
Chronologique of the President Henault to the same period ; 
3d, that part of Malte Brun, or of Arrowsmith's Abridgment 
of Malte Brun, which relates to the geography of France ; 4th, 
the first volume of Robertson's History of Charles V. ; 5th, that 
part of Mr. Hallam's History of the Middle Ages which relates 
to France ; 6th, M. G-uizot's Lectures on the Progress of Civil- 
ization in that country ; 7th, the Memoirs of Villehardouin, 
Joinville, Froissart, and Philip de Comines ; 8th, G-uicciardini ; 
9th, the first book of the History of the Council of Trent, by 
Paoli Sarpi; 10th, Davila; 11th, the Economies Royales of 
Sully ; 12th, the Life of Richeheu, by M. Jay ; 13th, M. Bazin's 
History of France under Louis XHL, and under the Ministry 
of Mazarin ; 14th, St. Aulaire's History of the Fronde ; 15th, 
the Memoirs of De Retz and of Mde. de Motteville ; 16th Yol- 
taire's Siecle de Louis XIV. ; and, lastly, the Memoirs of Dan- 
geau and of St. Simon, durmg the reign of that monarch. 

Some attention must also be bestowed on the physical geog^ 
raphy of France as connected with her political and social his- • 
tory. The limits which in our own days she has been accus- 
tomed to claim as having been assigned to her by the hand of 
Nature, were actually enjoyed by Transalpine G-aul at the time 
of the invasion of Caesar, and, to a great extent, even by mod- 
ern France as lately as the close of the reign of Charles VIII. 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 11 

The MediteiTaneaii, tlie Pyrenees, the Ocean, and the Rhine, 
from its mouths till it reaches the Alps, or their secondary 
chains, the Jura and the Vosges, circumscribe a territory the 
whole of which was once the inheritance of the G-allic race. 
The five great rivers by wliich it is watered, with their respect- 
ive tributaries, constitute one great connected system of inter- 
nal navigation. The high lands from which they flow, includ- 
ing all the country between the Alps and the lower slopes of the 
Vosges and the Cevennes, with the table-land of Auvergne, have 
ever been the fastnesses of national independence. The low 
lands, extending from these more elevated regions to the ocean, 
have been the battle-fields of the successive invaders and con- 
querors of Graul. 

With but few exceptions, the historians of France assume 
and suppose the existence of the French monarchy as a distinct 
state, and of the French people as a distinct nation, under each 
of the dynasties which were established successively in the per- 
son of Clovis, of Charlemagne, and of Hugues Capet. This 
misuse of words has induced much substantial error. The 
Prankish or Franco-Grallic empire had never really embraced 
more of Graul than lies between the Rhine and the Loire, until, 
by the cession of the Emperor Justinian, Provence was added 
to it. To the Bretons the Franks were known, not as fellow- 
siibjects, but as allies. By the people of Aquitaine they were 
regarded only as invaders and as enemies. It was not till the 
dissolution of the Prankish empire, and the consequent growth 
of the Feudal Confederation, that even the basis can be said to 
have been laid of the French monarchy, properly so called. It 
was not till nearly two centuries had elapsed after the establish- 
ment of feudalism, that the various states of which that mon- 
archy was at last composed, were fused into one great political 
body. The history of France, and even the separate existence 
of Prance, begins, therefore, not with the first dynasty, but 
with the third ; not with the conquests of Clovis, but with the 
'election of Hugues Capet. 

It might seem to foUow that the inquiries into which we are 
about to enter should also commence with that election ; and 
that inference might perhaps be just if my object were to in- 
vestigate the incidents, political and military, which distin- 
guished the reigns of the Capetian monarchs. But as I propose 



12 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

to consider cliiefly, if not exclusively, the formation and growth 
of the civil government, and of the national institutions of the 
French people, it will he necessary to advert to the state of 
G-aul both at the dissolution of the Roman empire and during 
the existence of the empire of the Franks, before we attempt to 
study the progress of France under the third and latest dynasty ; 
for, unless our retrospect he carried hack to the fountains, we 
shall in vain attempt to trace the current of the constitutional 
history of that kingdom. I can not, indeed, promise much en- 
tertainment from such a retrospect. Whoever engages in it 
must prepare himself for much which, if not barren, may at 
least prove wearisome and uninteresting. Yet the general prob- 
lems which he will have to consider are not very numerous. 
They may all be resolved into the five following inquiries. 
First, What were the nature and what the causes of those 
changes, social and political, which conducted G-aul from the 
state of a Roman province to that of a feudal sovereignty of 
princes confederate with each other, but all subject to one com- 
mon head or suzerain ? Secondly, What was the real charac- 
ter of that feudal sovereignty, and what its influence on the 
future condition of France ? Thirdly, What were the causes, 
social and political, which conducted France from the state of a 
feudal confederation to that of an absolute monarchy ? Fourth- 
ly, What was the real character of that monarchy, and what its 
influence on the future condition of France ? And, fifthly, 
What were the causes of its decline and of its fall at the French 
Revolution of 1789 ? 

Lightly as the hours at my command here will enable me, 
at any time, to touch on all or any of these topics, I shall not, 
in the present acadernical term, be able to reach the fifth and 
last of them ; and, for reasons to be hereafter explained, I 
shall pass over in silence the second, which respects the char- 
acter and influence of the feudal system. To render my plan 
regarding the rest as intelligible as may be to my hearers, I 
proceed to state what are the more specific questions which I 
propose to consider under each of the three "other general heads 
to what I have already referred. 

1. I design then, first, very briefly to inquire, What were 
the internal causes vrhich detached the Romano-G-allio prov- 
ince from the empire of Rome, and transferred it to the domin- 
ion of the Franks ? 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 13 

2. I shall next attempt to explain why the first Frankish 
dynasty (that of the Merovmgians) was superseded by the dy- 
nasty of Pepin in his own person, and in the persons of his 
Carlovingian descendants. 

3. The character and influence of Charlemagne will then 
engage our attention. 

4. We shall have to consider why, in the persons of his de- 
scendants, the Carlovingian dominion gave place to the Feudal 
Confederation under the suzerainte of Hugues Capet. 

5. Next in order will he the inquiry into the creation or de- 
velopment of the municipalities of France as one of the means 
of subverting the Feudal, and of elevating the Monarchical 
power. 

6. "We shall endeavor to trace the influence of the Crusades 
in producing the same results. 

7. The manner in which those results were promoted by 
the Crusade against the Albigenses — that is, by the invasions 
of Southern by Northern France — will then be considered, 

8. Our next problem will be, In what manner the judicial 
system and institutions of France promoted the Monarchical 
at the expense of the Feudal dominion. 

9. We shall then consider why the authority of the privi- 
leged orders of France, sacerdotal and noble, did not avert 
the growth of the absolute dominion of the French monarchs. 

10. I shall attempt to show why the growth of that Mo- 
narchical despotism was not arrested by the States- Greneral 
of France. 

11. It will afterward be necessary to inquire why it was 
not arrested by that power of the purse which belonged, at 
least in theory, to the Seignorial Courts and to the States- 
Greneral, 

12. I propose to investigate the reasons why the Reforma- 
tion did not yield in France its appropriate fruits of civil lib- 
erty, 

13. In immediate connection with that subject, I shall (as 
far as my time will allow) enter on the corresponding inquiry, 
Why literature, the mother of freedom in other lands, failed to 
give birth to it in Monarchical France, 

14. Passing to the consideration of the real character and 
influence of that monarchy, I hope to explain the transition 



14 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

from tlie paternal rule of Henry IV. to the stern despotism of 
E-ichelieu. 

15. The struggle of the Fronde for constitutional freedom 
and the administration of Mazarin will then occupy our at- 
tention. 

16. We shall afterward pass to a review of the government 
of France under Colbert ; and, 

Finally, my lectures for the present term will close with an 
attempt to estimate the administration of that government by 
Louis XIV. in person. 

Recurring to the preceding arrangement, I now proceed, 
though very briefly, to inquire, "What were the internal causes 
which detached the Romano- G-allic province from the empire 
of Rome, and transferred it to the dominion of the Franks ? 

Hereditary international hatred has never exhibited itself 
with more bitterness or greater deformity than between the 
Romans and the Grauls. The " proprium atque insitum in 
Romanes odium," which Livy ascribes to the G-allic people, 
was repaid by an enmity not less inveterate. During very 
nearly five centuries, the two nations waged against each other 
an internecine warfare ; and, from the time of Brennus to the 
days of Hannibal, the advantage was, almost invariably, with 
those whom Rome characterized as barbarians. After their 
victory at Allia, their entrance into the city, and their siege 
of the capital, they devastated the Latian territory throughout 
seventeen successive years. At the head of the great Italian 
confederacy, their descendants encountered consular armies at 
Sentinum, at Aretinum, at the Lake Vadimon, at Fesulse, and 
at Telamone. In the first Punic war they undertook the de- 
fense of the Carthaginian cities in Sicily. In the second, they 
composed a large majority of the force with which Hanni- 
bal triumphed at Placentia, Trebia, Thrasymene, and Cannse. 
They followed him to Africa, and partook of his defeat at 
Zama. And then came the day of fearful retribution. Ex- 
pelled from Italy, invaded in Graul, compelled to witness the 
settlement among them of the Roman colony of Narbonne, and 
to cede to Rome the province afterward known as Grallia Nar- 
bonensis, the Grauls had also to undergo, in their conflict with 
Marius, that defeat which half exterminated their Kimric or 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 15 

Belgic tribes, and for which Rome hailed the conqueror as her 
third founder, and poured out libations to him as to a god. 
And then appeared, to the north of the ^Vlps, the greatest of 
the warriors, and perhaps the gi-eatest of the historians, whom 
Home has produced ; whose genius is, however, insufficient 
to rescue from abhorrence the carnage which he both accom- 
plished and recorded. The best apology of Caesar is, that he 
was the avenger of the wrongs and humiliations of centuries. 
The best ealogy on the Grauls is, that even he, detailing with 
a hostile pen his relentless warfare against them, has drawn 
a picture with which the annals of Rome itself have nothing 
to compare as an exhibition of national heroism. Distracted 
as they were by dissensions between the different races, the 
different cities, and the different parties in the same cities of 
their common country, they balanced during nine years the 
arms of the wealthiest, the most powerful, and the most war- 
like of the nations of the earth, conducted by the greatest of 
her commanders, and possessmg the advantage of a secure 
basis for tlieu military operations in the Roman colonies on 
the shores of the Mediterranean. Nothing which either vir- 
tue or courage, craft or desperation could suggest, was left 
unattempted for their defense. The Duguesclins, the Colig- 
nis, and the Condes of a far distant age might pass for anti- 
types of Ambiorix, Dumnorix, and Vercingetorix, and of the 
other Gaulish chieftains whom the pen of Cgesar has deline- 
ated. Defeated, but not subdued, they prolonged their strug- 
gle for independence during more than a century after his 
death ; nor was it till the reign of Yespasian that, finally as- 
suming the character of a Roman province, Graul adopted the 
institutions, imitated the mamiers, and acquired the language 
of Rome. 

Two centuries of comparative tranquillity succeeded. If 
the eye be directed merely to the surface of society during 
that period, it may be depicted in the most brilliant colors. 
From the Mediterranean to the Scheldt might be numbered 
one hundred and fifteen cities, rivaling those of Italy in wealth, 
in population, and in architecture. Of these, Treves and Aries 
had the character of capitals. Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, and 
Strasbourg frequently became imperial residences. In each 
of these cities was a municipal government, of which Rome 



16 THE DECLINEAND FALL OF 

herself supplied the model. All the arts which minister to the 
luxuries of the rich, flourished in them. The nobler pursuits 
of learning were widely cultivated in schools established there 
by Augustus, and enlarged by Claudius. From Pliny and Ju- 
venal we learn how large was the demand for books at Lyons, 
and how great the eminence of the rhetoricians of that city. 
Terentius Varro and Trogus Pompeius among historians, Corr 
nelius G-allus and Petronius among poets, were either natives 
or inhabitants of Gaul. In the letters of Pliny may be read 
an account of the purchase made by one G-allic city of a statue 
of Mercury, on which a G-reek sculptor had bestowed ten years' 
labor, and for which he declares that the incredible sum of for- 
ty millions of sesterces, or about £320,000 sterling, was paid. 
In the eleventh book of the Annals of Tacitus may also be 
seen an account of the elevation and fall of Yalerius, a native 
G-aul, whose story illustrates the facility with which, in those 
times, the highest dignities of the empire could be attained by 
the wealthy and powerful natives of that once abhorred and 
dreaded race. 

But if we penetrate below the brilliant surface of civic so- 
ciety, we may, with equal truth, employ the darkest colors in 
depicting the state of G-aul between her final submission to 
Rome and her subjugation by the Burgundians, the Yisigoths, 
and the Franks. The changes which the habits, and, with 
them, the opinions of the people, underwent in that interval, 
may be considered as relating, first, to their nationality ; sec- 
ondly, to their civic institutions ; thirdly, to the public reve- 
nue ; fourthly, to their social condition ; fifthly, to their lan- 
guage ; and, lastly, to their religion. 

First, then, when invaded by Caesar, and when finally sub- 
jugated under Civilis, Gaul was inhabited by three distinct 
races of people, among each of whom the sentiment of national 
unity manifested itself in public spirit, with all its attendant 
virtues, and, in antipathy to their neighbors, with all its at- 
tendant crimes. But when Gaul had become a mere Roman 
province, that sentiment became rapidly, and altogether, ex- 
tinct. Under the successors of Yespasian, the conquered 
tribes no longer thought of themselves as belonging to Aqui- 
taine, or to Belgic or to Celtic Gaul. But neither had they 
learned to consider themselves as citizens of the "Western em- 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 17 

pire. Tliey heard of the rise and fall of new Csesars, of un- 
perial victories and defeats, of invasions of Italy, and of mu- 
tinies among the Praetorian Guards, with the kind of indiffer- 
ence with which we may suppose the people of the Carnatic 
to have received the intelligence of our recent wars in the 
Punjaub, or of the succession of governors-general at Calcutta. 

It appears, indeed, from a fragment of Livy, that Augustus 
convoked a general assembly of the Gauls at Narbonne ; and, 
at the distance of a hundred years, a similar assembly seems 
to have been held at Rheims, to arrange their final submission 
to liis successors. But no subsequent mention occurs of any 
such national convention until the fifth century, when Hono- 
rius made an attempt to revive their ancient diets as an in- 
strument of defense against the Barbaric invaders. The living 
spirit had then, however, passed away, and the dead form was 
evoked in vain. The sentiment of nationality was no more. 
The love of country was extinct, and with it had departed the 
best security for virtue, for courage, for freedom, for individual 
safety, and for social happiness. 

But, secondly, the civic institutions of Graul, even in her 
provincial state, might seem to have been well adapted to 
nourish and to shelter among her people tliis national spnit ; 
for, in appearance at least, her cities were governed by the 
same polity to which Rome herself, and the great body of her 
allies, had been indebted for their greatness. In the days of 
the republic, Marseilles and the adjacent G-reek settlements, 
Narbonne and the other Roman colonies, had become rich and 
powerful, and had enjoyed their full share in the dominion of 
Rome. But in the second and three following centuries, the 
cities of the Grallic province retained nothing of free municipal 
government but the hollow and deceptive semblance. Their 
magistracies had ceased to be electoral. All civic offices were 
divided among a small local aristocracy, who were called to 
the discharge of them in rotation or by lot. The great mass 
of the inhabitants of the cities was composed of emancipated 
slaves, or of proprietors or cultivators of land who had sought 
within their walls a temporary refuge from oppression. Im- 
perial rescripts continually interfered with the trades and 
common business of life, with the franchises of the citizens, 
and especially with the franchise of local legislation. But the 

B 



18 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

decay of the municipal greatness of Graul was induced chiefly 
"by the edicts which imposed on every municipality that fiscal 
office, to which, in modern France, was given the title of • 
Farmer- G-eneral. The Curiales of each city were made re- 
sponsible to the imperial treasury for the annual revenue, not 
only of the city itself, but of the whole circumjacent territory. 
It was their duty to remit these funds to the Praetorian Pre- 
fect at Treves, or to his vicar, at Aries. They were bound to 
levy and equip the proportion, for which their city was respon- 
sible, of the recruits annually raised for the imperial army. 
They were required to provide for the conveyance and main- 
tenance of all persons traveling at the public expense through 
the districts under their superintendence. To acquit them- 
selves of these various obligations, the Curiales had to appor- 
tion the consequent expenditure between the inhabitants both 
of their city and of the adjacent district. They were thus 
placed in a position at once the most invidious and the most 
dangerous. They had to answer the insatiable demands of 
the imperial treasury, and to encounter the discontents, the 
resistance, and the evasions of the contributors. To partici- 
pate in a municipal government thus came to be regarded, 
not as an honorable distinction, but as an unwelcome respon- 
sibility. In the Justinian code may be found many rescripts 
overruling claims for exemption from this service, although in 
some of those cases the grounds alleged by the claimants 
would seem to have been irresistibly strong. 

Thirdly, the change which the Roman conquest effected in 
the financial or fiscal system of G-aul was even yet more fatal 
to the happiness and character of the provincials. Laws, till 
then without example, were promulgated by the emperors for 
the supply of the wants of the Roman treasury. No national 
revenue, in the proper sense of the word, had ever been levied 
in G-aul while her people were still independent. But the 
conquerors crushed the conquered people beneath a burden of 
direct and improvident taxation, from which they had no longer 
the energy to escape by resistance and revolt. A land tax, 
rising to the almost incredible amount of one third of the net 
produce of the land, rendered agriculture the most unprofit- 
able, as, for other reasons, it was in those times among the 
most hazardous, of all the employments of capital. To en- 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 19 

hance toth the rigor and the absurdity of this impost, there 
was a new assessment, or, as it was called, indiction, every 
fifteenth year, when the contribution to be made from every 
farm was determined according to the increased or diminished 
productiveness of it. Nor was the cultivator entirely secure 
that, even during that term, his liability to the fisc might not 
be increased ; for on any urgent occasion the Praetorian Prefect 
might enhance it by what was denominated a supermdiction. 

By confiscations, or by the right of succession to land-owners 
who had died childless and intestate, the emperor became pos- 
sessed of an immense territory in every part of G-aul. Such 
estates in such hands were, of course, unproductive. As the 
imperial proprietor was no longer able to collect the land tax 
from these districts, so he found himself also unable to derive 
any rent from the greater part of them. Under the pressure 
of the indiction, farmers could not be found to till the soil. 
Many tracts of it were therefore abandoned, and many were 
assigned to discharged soldiers, to be held on a species of mih- 
tary tenure. Such was, at length, the depreciation of tliis 
property, that, as we learn from still extant rescripts, an inde- 
feasible title to public lands in the province was created in fa- 
vor of any one who should occupy and cultivate them during 
the period of only two years. At first sight, this unproductive- 
ness of the public lands might appear rather as a waste of the 
public resources, than as a direct fiscal oppression. But the 
fact is otherwise. To promote the culture of these unprofita- 
ble imperial domains were invented corvees ; that is, the obli- 
gation of personal services in conveying the produce of such 
lands to the public magazines, and in repairing the roads along 
which it was to be drawn. 

To the land tax and the corvees, the rapacious and ignorant 
financiers of Rome added a poll tax, payable by every female 
from the age of twelve, and by every male from the age of 
fourteen to the age, in either case, of sixty-five. The amount, 
however, seems to have differed really, though not avowedly, 
with the circumstances of the contributors. The maximum 
per head was about eighty shillings of our money ; but it was 
customary, because it was inevitable, to allow a considerable 
number of poor persons to pass as a single person, and to make 
up among them the required payment. 



20 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

The pressure of these accumnlated burdens was continually 
auo-mentins'. As one tract of land after another was thrown 
out of culture, the indiction on the rest became more and more 
oppressive. As increasing poverty diminished, the number of 
those who could, contribute the full amount of their, poll tax, 
the demands on the less indigent rose in exact proportion to the 
deficiency. The besom of fiscal oppression swept over the land 
as if the locust or the tempest had passed across it. The ex- 
actions of the ; tax-gatherer, beginning by the discouragement 
of industry, were followed by dejection, by distress, by disease, 
and by depopulation. 

And yet, fourthly, the Roman conquest produced results still 
more disastrous than these on the social condition of the G-allic 
people. . 

While G-aul was yet independent, society had been divided 
into three classes, consisting first of the free warriors and pro- 
prietors ; secondly, of their clients or vassals [ambacti) ; and, 
thirdly, of their slaves. A Highland chieftain of the seven- 
teenth century, with his clansmen , may represent to us the re- 
lation which subsisted between the two first of those classes. 
A body of English serfs of the twelfth century, adscripti gle- 
bce, may stand as antitypes of the third ; for the G-allic slave 
was sometimes the fellow- workman and sometimes. the partner 
of his owner. In a country where manual labor was abundant, 
and where the owner and the slave toiled together in the same 
fields, partook of the same repasts, and slept beneath the same 
roof, the bitterness of slavery could be scarcely known. 

But when G-aul was merged in the body of the Empire, an 
entire social revolution followed. "While war had greatly di- 
mmished the number of manual laborers, a change of manners 
had greatly enlarged the demand for such labor. The old G-al- 
lic chieftain began to aspire to the. dignities, the indulgences, 
and the immunities of a patrician, or, rather, of a noble of 
Rome. Adopting the ideas, and with them the habits, of the 
Italians, he dispossessed and destroyed that class whom we call 
the yeomanry — the very heart of the G-allic people, the true 
nation itself He ejected his old tenantry or clansmen from 
their ancient holdings, to constitute from the aggregation of 
them one of those vast estates or latifundia which were culti- 
vated entirely by slaves, for the behoof of the proprietor alone, 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 21 

and to which Pliny and Cokimella joined in ascribing the ruin 
of Italy. From that vast territory he drew the means of bound- 
less self-indulgence, but left to the husbandmen nothing beyond 
the most scanty allowance of the bare necessaries of human 
existence. When they were hurried by fatigue, by want, and 
by sickness to premature graves, he recruited their number 
from the Roman slave-markets. During his habitual residence 
at Rome or Baise, at Narbonne or Toulouse, he was repre- 
sented at his domain by the Villicus, a middle-man, who had 
also his fortune to wring out of the unrequited toils of these 
miserable bondsmen. Whoever is informed of the state of a 
West Indian plantation before the abolition of slavery, and of 
the relations in which the absent owner and resident manager 
then stood to each other and to the Negroes, has before him a 
lively image of an estate in Provincial G-aul in the second and 
third centuries of the Christian era. Whoever knows what 
was the effect of that system on the waste of human life, may 
estimate the depopulating effects of slavery during two hundred 
successive years in Provincial Graul. 

Fifthly, the disappearance of the Celtic language in Gaul 
during the era of its provincial dependency on Rome, affords . 
perhaps the most impressive of all illustrations of the sufferings 
of the people in that period. From the Rhine to the Pyrenees, 
a single tongue, though molded into several different and very 
dissimilar dialects, was spoken in the time of Julius. It was 
confined to Armorica in the time of Clovis. In the interven- 
ing centuries, it had been entirely laid aside throughout the 
rest of G-aul. By the powerful and wealthy proprietor it was 
regarded with contempt, as a remnant and a badge of ancient 
barbarism. With his fashionable guests at his villa he con- 
versed in Latin, with grammarians and rhetoricians at the 
capital in Greek, with his bailiffs perhaps in Celtic. Gradu- 
ally, though more slowly, his slaves also abandoned the use of 
that vulgar idiom. They invented a kind of patois in which 
to make themselves intelligible not only to their superiors, but 
to their fellow-bondsmen, who had been brought together from 
many distant lands. So universal was the change, that they 
even lost their national appellation ; and at the time of the 
Prankish invasion and conquests, were universally spoken of, 
not as Gauls, but as Romans. From this singular compromise 



22 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

between tlie copious speech of Cicero and tlie rude discourse 
of Caraotacus, at length emerged that language which excels 
all others, now vernacular among men, in the precision and 
delicacy with which it discriminates ail the more subtle forms 
of thought, and all the fluctuating shades of emotion. French 
bears to Latin the same relation in which English stands to 
Anglo-Saxon ; but there is this most significant distinction, 
that in France the language of the superior, in England the 
lanofuage of the subordinate, race forms the basis of the mod- 
ern nomenclature. 

But, sixthly. While these changes were in progress, there 
was silently at work another, a miore mighty and a more en- 
during revolution. I refer to the introduction of Christianity. 
This is a subject on which it is not possible that I should be 
silent ; but neither is it possible that I should handle it with- 
out the risk of inducing some misapprehension. It will be 
my careful endeavor to obviate that danger. In referring to 
the diffusion of the G-ospel in Graul, I shall view it only as one 
of those great events, or rather as one of those chains of events, 
by the collation and interweaving of which the political or so- 
•cial history of mankind is constructed. I shall pass by in 
total silence the controversies, theological or ecclesiastical, 
with which such inquiries are so often allied. Those so much 
agitated questions respecting the government, the worship, and 
the doctrines of the ancient Church, are equally beyond my 
province and my competency. 

The earliest of the great conquests of Cliristianity were ef- 
fected in the East. In the Western empire it triumphed more 
tardily. Notwithstanding the zealous efforts of so many French 
antiquarians to give a more remote date to the establishment 
of the principal seats of episcopacy in France, it is difficult to 
find any authentic proof of their existence before the middle 
of the third century. At that era were founded the churches 
of Tours, Clermont, Paris, Toulouse, Aries, and many others. 
None of the G-allio ecclesiastical writers, whose works or whose 
names are still extant, flourished before that time. But in the 
next or fourth age, G-aul became, in appearance at least, ex- 
clusively Christian. An hereditary, though secret, paganism 
lingered indeed among the wealthier and more powerful of the 
provincials ; nor was the religion of the Druids without its ad- 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 23 

herents among tlie poorer classes of society, especially in Ar- 
morica. But neither the courtiers nor the meaner subjects of 
Constantino and his successors aspired to the crown of martyr- 
dom in defense of their ancient superstitions, or hazarded any 
open avowal of them. 

Yet the spirit of martyrdom, if it had existed, would not 
have died away from the want of active exercise. The offer- 
ing of sacrifices to idols was prohibited by one Christian em- 
peror, under the penalty of death. Armed bands under the 
immediate direction of the prelates of G-aul oast down the 
shrines of the false gods, both of the Eoman and the Celtic 
mythology. Their worshipers were interdicted from all lu- 
crative pursuits, and excluded from all honorable stations and 
employments. In the times in which our lot has fallen, it is 
easy to condemn these excesses, and to perceive how blind 
was the zeal in which they originated ; for persecution has no 
longer any apologists among us ; nor is any one at this day ig- 
norant of the arguments which have discredited and rebuked 
it. But even now, how difficult, if not impossible, is it to de- 
termine with absolute precision the limits and extent of the 
duty of toleration ? Like all our other duties, indeed, it re--' 
jects the bondage of any peremptory definition ; and the indis- 
tinctness of our own thoughts on the subject in these enlight- 
ened days may perhaps suggest good reasons why we should 
regard with indulgence the errors of the rulers of the Church 
at that remote period. 

But suppose them to have been as unpardonably erroneous 
as they are esteemed by their modern French censors, still it 
is simply absurd to compare them (as those censors have done) 
to the sanguinary missionaries of the creed of Mohammed. To 
ascribe to the sword the progress of the Christian faith in Graul, 
is not only to substitute conjecture for proof, but is to depend 
on a conjecture utterly gratuitous and improbable. Heathen- 
ism needed no such keen weapon for its overthrow. It had 
cast no deep roots in the conscience, the affections, or the in- 
tellect of mankmd. It fell in Gaul as it has fallen elsewhere. 
It expired among the more zealous few, beneath the genial in- 
fluences of the Grospel. It expired among the apathetic mul- 
titude, beneath the worldly influence of fashion, of example, 
pf great names, and of the shiftings of public opinion. Chris- 



24 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

tianity was first the consolation of the slave. It at length be- 
came the boast of the emperor. Thenceforward it advanced, 
conquering and to conquer, with a power which the sword 
could not have materially aided, and could not have at all ar- 
rested. 

: It is, however, asserted that the Church extended her do- 
minion in Graul by other arts, which, if less criminal than 
those of persecution, were scarcely less unhallowed. From the 
piety or the fears of the. emperor, the clergy extorted (such is 
the charge) an exemption from the capitation tax which so 
sorely oppressed the other members of society. By the same 
means they are said to have obtained the edicts which au- 
thorized them to . accept the testamentary donations of their 
wealthy penitents ; and they are accused of having taught the 
dying and the sick that the Deity would be most effectually 
propitiated by transferring to his ministers the inheritances 
of their children. It is further imputed to them, that, ad- 
vancing one step farther in this mercenary career, they pro- 
cured the enactment of laws which delivered their own lands 
from the indiotions and superindictions to which every other 
class of proprietors was liable. The triple immunity thus ac- 
quired from the poll tax, the corvees, and the land tax, is there- 
fore arraigned as fraudulent, and invidious, and unjust. 

To deny that in the fourth and fifth centuries the priesthood 
were often chargeable with cupidity, and the laity with super- 
stition, would indeed be a hopeless task. Let it be assumed 
that the crafts of the one, and the follies of the other, were as 
extravagant as they appear in the satirical portraitures of the 
most bitter of their modern antagonists. Yet there are more 
forms of bigotry than one. There have been philosophical as 
well as sacerdotal bigots. The narrowness of mind to which 
no secular interests but those of churchmen appear of any ac- 
count, is not more pitiable than the narrowness of mind which 
refuses to accept, or is unable to appreciate, any secular ad- 
vantage accruing to society at large, if the clerical order hap- 
pens to be the channel of it. If it be right to condemn the 
fiscal tyranny of the Roman rulers of Graul, it can hardly be 
also right to condemn those sacerdotal claims, and those im- 
perial concessions by wliich the range of that tyranny was nar- 
rowed. If poverty was the withering curse of the people, it 



THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 25 

can scarcely he just to censure rigidly tlie only laws wliicli 
promoted tlie accumulation of capital among tliem. If the 
general neglect of agriculture was depopulating G-aul, the cler- 
gy were not perhaps very culpable in acquiring the wealth, 
and with it the security, by means of which they were ena- 
bled to cultivate many large though neglected districts in that 
province. It is agreed that the policy of the state was deplor- 
ably short-sighted and oppressive. "Why then maintain that, in 
counteracting it, the policy of the Church was either improvi- 
dent or unjust ? 

The Church is next arraigned as selfish and ambitious, be- 
cause it formed itself into a vast clerical corporation, living 
under laws and usages peculiar to itself, and not acknowledging 
the jurisdiction of the temporal tribunals. That the church- 
men of the fourth century lived beneath a ruthless despotism, 
no one attempts to deny. That they opposed to it the only 
barrier by which the imperial tyranny could, in that age, be 
arrested in its course, is equally indisputable. If they had 
been laymen, they would have been celebrated as patriots by 
the very persons who, because they were priests, have de- 
nounced them as usurpers. If the bishops of the fourth cen- 
tury had lived under the Republic, they would have been 
illustrious as tribunes of the people. If the G-racchi had been 
contemporaries of Theodosius, their names would have taken 
the places which Ambrose and Martin of Tours at present hold 
in ecclesiastical history. A brave resistance to despotic au- 
thority has surely no less title to our sympathy, if it proceeds 
from the episcopal throne, than if it be made amid the tumults 
of the Forum. 

But the association of ideas, so inveterate with some of our 
contemporaries in France, which regards the mitre as inca- 
pable of an alliance with the cause of civil liberty, has mduced 
some of them to impute it to the bishops of the fourth century 
as an ojffense, that they were so commonly raised to that oJSice 
by the clamorous suffrages of the people, at large. How ex- 
travagant the prejudice which is thus directed against the one 
element of popular freedom then, extant in the empire, because 
it ministered to the influence of the priesthood ! How strange 
the inconsistency which, while it regrets the extinct comitia 
of the Eepublic, resents and condemns the new-born comitia 
of the Church ! 



26 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

It is impossible to ascertain, as indeed it would be superflu- 
ous to inquire, how far unworthy, or secular, or narrow motives 
prompted the measures to which the sacerdotal order were 
indebted for their wealth, their privileges, and then* greatness ? • 
Doubtless such impulses actuated the great majority of their 
number in a greater or less degree, and more or less con- 
sciously to themselves. The clergy of those times partook of 
the common infirmities of our nature, and of the faults char- 
acteristic of their age. But that their evangelical labors 
were attended with the most beneficent results — that the 
Church became in the E-omano-G-allic province, as in all other 
lands, the very salt of the earth — that her genial influence 
penetrated in many du'ections to the interior, and was diffused 
almost universally throughout the surface of the provincial 
society — all this might have seemed too trite and too obvious 
for any formal assertion of it, if peculiar circumstances had 
not tended to cast an unmerited shade over the history of that 
branch of the Church Universal. 

As Saint Augustin in Africa, so Salvian in G-aul, denounced, 
in unmeasured terms, the pollutions, the cruelties, and the 
crimes of the Christian world, and especially of those among 
whom they lived. They believed and taught that the Deity 
had summoned the Barbarians from the North as his scourge 
to punish the spiritual apostasy of a guilty people. The in- 
vectives of Salvian have recently been quoted, and his gloomy 
colors M-eproduced among ourselves, by learned writers, who 
were pledged by the necessities of their argument to depre- 
ciate ancient Christianity, as it existed in the third and fourth 
centuries in G-aul. If those controversialists had used equal 
diligence in investigating the moral condition, not of Graul 
only, but of the Western empire at large, when Christianity 
first triumphed there, they would probably have attributed less 
weight to Salvian's charges against the early Church. They 
would have observed that the Christian converts, portrayed 
on his canvas, were no other than that thoughtless multitude 
who followed Julian as they had followed Constantino, and as 
they would (if necessary) have followed Zoroaster or Budhu. 
The Roman empire did not lay aside her deformities, or change 
her real character, because a servile mob had erected the Cross 
amid the ruined shrines of Ceres or of Pan. "When plunged 



THE ROMA^vfO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 27 

into those mephitic vapors, the lamp of the G-ospel could not 
glow with its "true and native brilliancy. Consider the exhi- 
bitions of depravity with which, in glancing over the history 
and the literature of imperial Rome, the eye is every where 
revolted. Bear in mind the narratives of Suetonius, and the 
delineations of Juvenal. Reflect on what we know or believe 
(on too conclusive evidence) of their domestic habits, as illus- 
trated by the relics of Pompeii. Review the proscriptions of 
the Triumvirates, the exterminating wars of Csesar and his 
successors, the slave-markets and Ergastula of Rome, her 
enervating luxury, the sanguinary exhibitions of the Circus, 
the iron bondage in which she held the dependent nations, 
the guilty rites with which so many of her heathen temples 
were polluted, and the remorseless persecutions of the Chris- 
tians tlu-oughout the Empire, and then judge whether even 
Christianity itself could have contended, with immediate suc- 
cess, against such an accumulation of crime and wretchedness. 
It was no part of the design of the Gospel to change the con- 
ditions on which we hold our sublunary existence, or to abro- 
gate the fundamental laws of human society. Those condi- 
tions and those laws require that the guilt and folly of ages 
shall be expiated by ages of calamity and distress. It is true, 
indeed, that as Sin converted the Grarden of Eden into a 
desolate wilderness, so is it the ultimate destination of our 
holy faith to make that wilderness once more blossom as a 
garden. But not immediately, abruptly, or as by the working 
of some magical incantation. The great scheme of Providence 
is not superseded by the great scheme of Christianity, It is 
no less true now than it was true before that revelation, that 
the improvement of nations, and the growth of their social 
happiness, must be a deliberate and a tardy process, to be 
pursued through many a painful reverse, and through much 
purifying affliction. Yet the leaven which is at length to 
pervade and vivify the whole mass is never altogether inert, 
impassive, or inefliectual. It never has been so in any land ; 
it was never really so in Provincial Graul. "When Salvian was 
deploring her sins and predicting her punishment, the minds 
of the G-allio people were doubtless really, though silently, 
imbibing much of the higher and the holier influences of the 
Grospel and of the Church among them. These it was not 



28 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

given to liis or to any human eye to penetrate. Yet we may 
rejoice to kiiow and to acknowledge, that in G-aul tlie early 
Church was the one great antagonist of the wrongs which 
were then done upon the earth — that she narrowed the range 
of fiscal tyranny — that she mitigated the overwhelming pov- 
erty of the people — ^that she promoted the accumulation of 
capital — that she contributed to the restoration of agriculture 
— ^that she balanced and held in check the imperial despotism 
—that she revived within herself the remembrance and the 
use of the great franchise of popular election — and that the 
gloomy portraits which have been drawn of her internal or 
moral state, are the mere exaggerations of those who would 
render the Church responsible for the crimes with which it is 
her office to contend, and for the miseries which it is her high 
commission effectually, though gradually, to relieve. 

I might add that, in the same age and country, the Church 
commenced her warfare against domestic and prsedial slavery 
— a warfare of which the vicissitudes and the results embrace 
a field of inquiry on which it will be impossible for me to enter 
on the present, or, indeed, on any future occasion. I regret 
this inevitable omission the less, because the influence of the 
Church in extinguishing slavery has lately been discussed among 
ourselves with a copiousness and a learning which, wliile it 
makes competition needless, would also render it very formi- 
dable. 

With this very brief and general sketch of the condition of 
the people of G-aul during the period in which, having lost their 
independence, they became members of a province of the em- 
phe, I close this lecture. In the next which I shall address to 
you, I propose to review the state of G-aul and of its inhabitants 
during the period in which it formed one great member of the 
empire of the Franks. 






THE BIEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 29 



LECTURE 11. 

ON THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 

The problem wliicli, in my last lecture, I proposed for our 
consideration to-day, may be stated in the following terms : 
What were the causes of the transfer of the Franco-G-allio em- 
pire from the First to the Second Dynasty, from the lineage of 
Clovis to that of Pepin ? The corresponding problem which 
will hereafter engage our attention is, What were the causes of 
the transfer of the dominion of France from the Second Dynas- 
ty to the Third, from the lineage of Pepin to that of Hugues 
Capet ? With a view to the distinct explanation of the answer 
which I have to make to each of those questions, it is neces- 
sary that I should begin by reminding you, however briefly, of 
the chief of those occurrences which attended the growth, the 
decline, and the fall of the sovereignty of the Franks in Gaul. 

Toward the end of the fourth century, the great body of the 
Grothic nation were settled in Thrace as the mercenary defend- 
ers of the empire of the East. There the Yisigoths, or Western 
G-oths, elected the terrible Alaric as their king or general, and 
marched under his guidance to the capture and desolation of 
Rome. On his death in 412, Ataulph, his successor, entered 
into an alliance, both domestic and pohtical, with Honorius. 
who still maintained at Ravenna the faint image of the emphe 
of the Ceesars. His sister, Placidia, became the wife of the 
Grothic chief, who, at her persuasion, condescended to assume 
the character of a Roman general, to march beneath the im- 
perial standard into G-aul, to crush the rivals of Honorius in 
that province, and to accept from his hands the investiture of 
a G-allic kingdom, of which the Mediterranean, the Ocean, the 
Pyrenees, and the Loire were the boundaries. It was called 
the kingdom of the Yisigoths, and was governed by Ataulph 
rather in the spirit of a Roman officer than in that of an inde- 
pendent sovereign. He acknowledged the authority of Hono- 
rius, and received from Ravenna edicts establishing laws, tri- 



30 THE DECLINE AND PALL OF 

bunals, and municipal offices among Ms subjects, whether of 
Gothic or of Grallic origin. 

At nearly the same time, and by means not dissimilar, an- 
other kingdom was acquired on the eastern side of the G-allic 
province by the Burgundians. That name is said to have been 
given to them by the more nomade tribes of Grermany, in scorn 
of their effeminate taste for towns and settled habitations. If 
so, it may reasonably be inferred that they were less barbarous 
than the other Teutonic people ; but they were certainly not less 
warlike. They had marched from their abodes on the Yistula 
toward the right bank of the Rhine, and were wandering there 
in quest of new settlements, when they crossed the river as 
auxiliaries of Jovinus, one of the G-allic aspirants to the purple. 
To him it proved a fatal alliance. The Burgundians sent his 
head to Ravenna as a peace-offering to Honorius, who reward- 
ed their treachery by a grant of territories extending from the 
Lake of G-eneva to the junction of the Rhine with the Moselle. 
From them the great province of Burgundy derived its name ; 
and there they formed a monarchy which was vu'tually inde- 
pendent, though they also were content to act as the soldiers, 
and even as the vassals of Rome, until the latest shadow of the 
imperial majesty had faded away in the person of Augustulus. 

In the same age, a confederation of G-ermanic tribes, known 
collectively by the generic name of Franks, had established 
themselves along the eastern banks of the Rhine, from its 
mouths to its junction with the Maine ; and throughout the 
whole of that region of which the Rhine is the northern, and 
the Meuse the southern boundary. Of these tribes, the most 
eminent were the Salian and the Ripuarian. The kings or 
leaders of each of them were denominated Meer-wigs (that is, 
Sea "Warriors), a title which they afterward transmitted to the 
Merovingian, c5r First Frankish Dynasty. 

The earliest of these monarohs who belongs to authentic 
history is Clovis, who, toward the end of the fifth century, 
marched from Tournay and the Tournesis at the head of the 
Salian Franks, to the invasion and conquest of the G-allio 
province. With the aid of his confederate Frankish tribes, he 
subdued it all except Armorica, and the kingdoms of the Visi- 
goths, and the Burgundians. He was himself subdued by the 
charms of Clotilda, a Burgundian princess, who became at 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY, 31 

once his wife and his chief counselor. At her instance he 
embraced Chiistianity, and then plunged into a new and haz- 
ardous war with the Visigoths, in reliance on what she had 
taught him to regard as miraculous omens of success. Like 
so many other conquerors, Clovis found in religion a pretext 
for the crimes which religion most sternly condemns'. The 
Yisigoths were Arians, and he the single monarch of his age 
who adhered to the confession of Nicsea. After a great, though 
incomplete triumph over his heretical neighbors, he died in 
the year 511, and transmitted to his four sons a sovereignty 
extending from the Elbe to the G-aronne, and embracing all 
the possessions of the Franks on either bank of the Rhine. 

The Frankish army divided this inheritance among the sons 
of Clovis, though in such a manner as to give to no one of 
them a continuous or unbroken territory. But under this di- 
vided rule, the empire of the Franks grew rapidly, both in 
power and in extent. Burgundy and Thuringia were con- 
quered ; and Franconia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Suabia were 
compelled to become members of the Frankish confederation. 
At the distance of a quarter of a century from the death of 
Clovis, all his conquests in Gaul and Burgundy — united to 
Savoy, Switzerland, Belgium, and to nearly the whole of 
"Western Grermany — constituted one formidable state, which 
acknowledged the dominion of his sons. 

When another quarter of a century had expired, the family 
of Clovis was extinct, except in the persons of the four sons of 
Clotaire, his youngest son. Again the army effected a four- 
fold apportionment of the Frankish empire. To each of the 
heirs of Clovis they assigned one of the four kingdoms of Aqui- 
taine. Burgundy, Neustria, and Austrasia — the two last, as 
the words imply, lying respectively to the west and to the east 
of each other ; the boundary common to them both consisting 
of an irregular and imaginary line drawn from Bar-sur-Aube 
to the mouths of the Scheldt. The confederate states of Grer- 
many were attached to Austrasia. 

With this second partition commences the decline of the 
Merovingian Dynasty. A child in his sixth year having been 
acknowledged by the Austrasians as their king, the Grermans 
beyond the Rhine indignantly detached themselves from the 
empu-e of the Franks ; while an officer, with the title of Ma- 



32 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

jor Domus, or Mayor of the Palace, was appointed to govern 
the Austrasian kingdom during the minority of the infant 
sovereign. It proved a disastrous innovation and a fatal 
precedent. 

At the commencement of the seventh century, the only sur- 
viving descendant of Clotaire was his grandson, Clotaire, the 
second of that name. Bach of the four monarchies of Aqui- 
taine, Burgundy, Neustria, and Austrasia, therefore, acknowl- 
edged him for their king. It was, however, a merely nominal 
allegiance. All real authority had passed to the mayors of the 
palace, and thenceforward the Merovingian sovereigns were 
hut so many royal phantoms, enjoying the luxuries, and main- 
taining some of the pomp and pageantry of kings, hut power- 
less alike in the council and in the field. 

This real though disguised revolution gave hirth to other - 
changes in the Franco- Grallic government. Many of the chiefs 
or captains had received either local commands, or extensive 
grants of land, and constituted an aristocracy strong enough 
to negotiate, and to contend on equal terms, not only with their 
feehle monarchs, hut also with the mayors, who really governed 
hoth the palace and the kingdom. Among these magnates, 
the most eminent was Pepin of Heristal. Under the modest 
title of Duke of Austrasia, he had become the real ruler of that 
kingdom, and progressively added to that dignity, and to his 
own extensive territories, the office of Mayor of the Palace hoth 
in Burgundy and in Neustria. When the aristocracy had thus 
triumphed in the person of Pepin, not only over the titular 
sovereign of the Pranco-Grallic empire, hut also over the mayors 
of the palace, its real sovereigns, he labored assiduously, and 
with good success, to confirm his power by aristocratic friend- 
ships and alliances. From year to year he summoned the no- 
bles to meet and to deliberate under his own presidency at the 
Champs de Mars, the Comitia of the Franks. The influence 
of his wealth, his station, his abilities, and his military renown, 
continually increased the number and the zeal of his adherents. 
The offices of Duke of Austrasia and Mayor of the Palace in 
Neustria and Burgundy were at length acknowledged to be 
hereditary in his house. Thus, in every thing but the name, 
Pepin was king of the Prankish tribes ; but the time for as- 
suming that name was still unripe when he died, leaving his 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 33 

high offices and his vast possessions to an infant and illegiti- 
mate grandson. 

But he also left a son whose fame and power were destined 
to eclipse his own. Charles Martel (the name he hears in his- 
tory) soon fought his way to the inheritance of his father ; and 
though content, like him, to rule in the name of a nominal Me- 
rovingian king, he became the idol of the army, and the real 
and triumphant head of the Frankish monarchy. He compelled 
Suahia and Bavaria to resume their ancient union with it, and 
at the great hattle of Poitiers in 732, he commenced that de- 
liverance of Western Europe from the Saracenic yoke which 
was consummated in the wars of many succeeding years. 

To Charles eventually succeeded Pepin, the second of his 
sons, whose historical name is Pepin-le-Bref. During nearly 
one hundred years the government of the Franks had heen 
conducted under the veil of a fiction which had now become 
too transparent for further use. By the advice of Pope Zacha- 
ry, and hy the hands of Boniface, archhishop of Mentz, Chil- 
deric, the last of the Merovingians, was deposed, and his crown 
was solemnly placed on the head of Pepin, the last of the may- 
ors of the Frankish palace, and the first king of the Second or 
Carlovingian Dynasty. 

For her services to Pepin-le-Bref, the Church received an 
early and an ample recompense. He assigned to the clergy 
of his empire not only a place, hut a supremacy, in the na- 
tional councils. He confirmed and enlarged the temporal 
rights of the sacerdotal hody. He bestowed on the Pope and 
his successors the sovereignty over the exarchate of Ravemio , 
including what was then called the duchy of Rome. And then, 
directing the arms of his subjects to foreign conquest, he en- 
larged the limits of his dominions, and left them on his death, 
in 768, to be divided between his sons Carloman and Charles- 

Carloman survived his father during three years only ; after 
which Charles, or Charlemagne, became the single sovereign 
of the empire of the Franks. He extended it over every land 
in which the languages of Rome or G-ermany, or in which any 
tongue derived from them, were at that time spoken. Reign- 
ing the undisputed monarch of Europe, from the Elbe to the 
Ebro, from the Danube to the Adriatic, from the Alps to Bene- 
ventum — the head of an empire equal in extent and in power 

C 



34 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

to that of the later emperors of the "West, he received from 
Pope Leo III. the diadem, and with it the imperial title, which 
had fallen from the faint hold of Augustulus more than three 
centuries before. 

Over this vast territory Charlemagne reigned, with an in- 
tellect to discern, a soul to desire, and a will to pursue, the 
highest attainable interests of the nations by whom it was 
peopled. Perhaps the character of so zealous a patron of men 
of letters, and of so munificent a benefactor of the papacy, 
may have been drawn in too brilliant colors by his literary 
and ecclesiastical eulogists. But what remains of his legisla- 
tion, and the authentic records of his public acts, give him an 
indisputable title to the appellation of the Grreat, which his 
subjects bestowed upon him after his death, and which the 
unanimous suffrage of the whole civilized world has subse- 
quently ratified. 

Yet, obeying the general law of our existence, Charlemagne 
was the creature of the age in which he lived, imbibing much 
of its spirit, and in bondage to many of its errors. And hence 
it happened that the lofty edifice of his power crumbled into 
dust when his own strong hand and his own plastic genius 
could no longer be exerted to consolidate and to support it. 
Perhaps the materials with which he was compelled to work 
m.ay have been incapable of any more permanent cohesion ; 
or, perhaps, the enthusiasm of his admirers may have con- 
cealed from him, as from themselves, the defects of his work- 
manship. 

To Pepin of Heristal, the author of the greatness of his 
house ; to Charles Martel, the Miltiades of modern Europe ; 
to Pepin-le-Bref, the founder of the Carlovingian Dynasty, and 
of the temporal dominion of the Popes ; and to Charlemagne, 
the restorer of the Western empire, succeeded Louis the De- 
bonnaire, a devout and virtuous man, and even a patriotic 
prince, but whose personal history is degraded by monastic 
superstitions, by uxorious fondness, and by imbecility of spir- 
it, and the history of whose reign is composed of little else 
than the calamities and crimes of the civil wars which he 
waged with his own children. His crown devolved first on 
his eldest son, Lothaire, the heir of the disasters, though not 
of the piety of his father ; and then on his youngest son, 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 35 

Charles the Bald, who, without courage, or talents, or conduct, 
was passively drifted by the current of events to titular dig- 
nities, and to a nominal extent of empire scarcely inferior to 
those of which Charlemagne had enjoyed the reality. Charles 
died in the year 877. Within twelve years from that time, 
the throne of Charlemagne was occupied and disgraced by 
Louis the Stammerer, by Louis III., by Carloman, and by 
Charles the Fat. On the deposition of the last of those princes 
in 888, the dynasty itself was virtually extinguished. 

A hundred years of anarchy followed, though not without 
some occasional semblance of a regular government. The 
history of that age commemorates a multitude of princes who, 
with various success, and on grounds as various, laid claim 
to the Carlovingian crown — some of them deriving their title 
through the female, and some through the illegitimate kindred 
of that royal race — some assuming the imperial, and some 
aspiring only to the royal title ; but no two of them in suc- 
cession pretending to the same extent of dominion, nor any 
one of them earning the praise of any eminent personal quali- 
ties, of any wisdom in civil government, or of any triumph in 
war. The long and wearisome narrative of their contests and 
their depositions, of their follies and their guilt, of their weak- 
ness and their miseries, reaches at length a welcome close in 
the year 987, when Hugues Capet, being elected by his army 
to wear the crown of France, laid the foundation of the Third 
or Capetian Dynasty. He succeeded, however, to a weak and 
almost titular dominion. Within the limits of ancient G-aul 
there had grown up, during the preceding anarchy, four king- 
doms and fifty-five great fiefs, each acknowledging in form, but 
denying in substance, the superiority of the nominal head of 
the Carlovingian empu-e, and their own subordination to him. 

From the preceding glance, rapid as it is, at the histor}^ of 
the Franco- Grallio empire, it appears that the founders of each 
of the first two dynasties effected conquests of great extent, 
rapidity, and duration ; that the dominion so acquired by each 
of them underwent, in the persons of his descendants, a pre- 
cipitate and irremediable decline ; that, in either case, the 
powers of the enfeebled monarchy were usurped by a body of 
aristocratic chiefs ; that, in both the first and the second races, 
one of those chiefs at length usurped the crown of his sever- 



36 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

eign, and transmitted it to his own descendants'; and that, 
from the commencement to the close of each of these two 
successive series of events, there were perceptibly germina- 
ting both the seeds of that civil polity which we call the Feudal 
system, and the seeds of that Ecclesiastical polity which re- 
stored to Rome her ancient supremacy over the Western world. 
Now this remarkable coincidence between the fortunes of the 
two dynasties can not have been fortuitous ; that is, it can not 
have been referable to causes too recondite for human scruti- 
ny. During the five centuries over which these phenomena 
extended, there must have always been at work some forces 
conducing to this remarkable reproduction of the same results ; 
some effective agency of which man himself was at one time 
the unconscious, and at another time the unwilling, instru- 
ment. "What, then, were those enduring springs of action, by 
the elastic power of which each of the Franco-G-allio monarch- 
ies arose with such similar promptitude — fell into so similar 
a lifelessness — made way for so similar an aristocratic usurp- 
ation — and were so similarly productive of results, ecclesiasti- 
cal and civil, the unexhausted influence of which we can yet 
perceive and feel after the lapse of so many ages ? 

Bvery French writer with whom I am acquainted has la- 
bored to find the answer to that problem. I shall not attempt 
to explain, or even to recapitulate, their solutions of it. It 
may be sufficient to say, that they generally find the causes 
of these phenomena either in the Grermanic institutions in- 
troduced by the conquerors into G-aul — or in the tenures on 
which land was granted there subsequently to the conquest — 
or in the subordination of ranks and of political privileges then 
first established between the different classes of the inhabit- 
ants — or in the new codes and judicial tribunals to which 
they were then subjected — or in the personal characters of 
the monarchs who inherited the crowns of Clovis or of Charle- 
magne — or in the dismemberments of their dominions for the 
benefit of their sons — or in the combination of some two or 
more of these causes — or in other causes similar and analo- 
gous to these. Now it would be mere folly and arrogance to 
suppose that men so learned, so laborious, and so acute as 
those who have advocated these opinions, have one after the 
other fallen into grave and palpable errors on a subject not 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 37 

perhaps in itself very difficult or obscure. On the contrary, 
I doubt not that Daniel and Du Bos, and Mably, and Boulain- 
villiers, and especially MM. G-uizot and Thierry, have rightly 
deciphered much of the scroll of their nation's remoter history. 
I venture merely to believe that the love of country, and the 
love of refinement, and the love of generalization, so charac- 
teristic of then- literature, have rendered them reluctant to 
perceive, and slow to confess, a more obvious though a less 
attractive truth — the truth, I mean, that, under both the 
Merovingian and the Carlovingian dynasties, France pursued 
the same downv^ard path, to the same brink of anarchy, be- 
cause, under both, a barbaric people were living beneath the 
rule of barbaric kings. 

So intimate is the alliance between history and romance, 
between the facts treasured up in the memory, and the pic- 
tures into which they group or resolve themselves in the 
imagination, that it is given to no man, however vast his 
learning, or profound his discernment, to contemplate the 
events of former times in an aspect absolutely genuine and 
exempt from all the distortions, and from all the false color- 
ing, induced by ideal representations of them. Gribbon cer- 
tainly did not possess that gift when he adorned the wars 
and policy of Clovis with all the embellishments of his gor- 
geous eloquence. Even M. G-uizot did not, I think, possess 
it, when he contemplated them as pregnant at every stage 
with the deepest lessons of social philosophy. The mind of 
Tacitus himself (to hazard a far more daring criticism) was 
not wholly exempt from this kind of dalliance with the beau- 
tiful to the neglect of the real, when he was delineating the 
people from whom Clovis and his warriors descended ; for, 
in his Treatise on the Manners of the G-ermans, the true though 
unavowed design of the great historian, as we well know, was 
to exhibit and to rebuke the degeneracy of the manners of 
Rome. And hence it happened that the graphic skill with 
which he sketched the free barbarian of the forest was greater 
than the pictorial fidelity of the portrait. It better suited his 
purpose to portray the more striking characteristics of the 
Teutonic races collectively, than to investigate the more minute 
peculiarities which distinguished them from each other. Yet 
we can not doubt that, even in his day, they were far widely 



OO THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

discriminated in fact, tlian in his delineation of them, as, be- 
yond all controversy, they were so jn the age of Clovis. 

Thus, for example, the Burgundians, before their irruption 
to G-aul, were remarkable for then- skill as artisans ; and in 
the poems in which, not long after that event, they were de- 
scribed by Sidonius Apollinaris, we have the best attestation 
of their resemblance to the kind and simple-hearted G-erman 
of our own days. Thus also the G-othic people, almost im- 
mediately after their settlement in Aquitaine, manifested a 
singular aptitude for a yet higher civilization ; for, if St. 
Jerome was correctly informed, Ataulph, their king, seriously 
projected the substitution of a new Grothic for the old Roman 
empire ; a scheme in which the character of Julius was to be 
ascribed to Alario, that of Augustus being reserved for the 
projector himself. Euric, the successor of Ataulph, filled his 
court at Toulouse with rhetoricians, poets, and grammarians ; 
and coveted (and not altogether in vain) the applause of the 
Italian critics for the pure Latinity of his dispatches. 

The Francs, on the other hand, were a barbarous people, 
and their history is in fact a barbaric history. At their en- 
trance into G-aul they were worshipers of Odin, and believed 
that the gates of the "Walhalla rolled back spontaneously on 
their hinges to admit the warrior who had dyed, with the 
blood of his enemies, the battle-field on which he had himself 
fallen. From their settlements on the Lower Rhine they had 
sometimes marched to the defense of the Romano-G-allic prov- 
ince, but more frequently and gladly to the invasion of it. 
Their appetite for rapine was insatiate, unrestrained, and ir- 
resistible. In war they were the prototypes of the Norman 
pirates of a later age, or of the West Indian buccaneers of 
more modern times. In peace they were the very counterpart 
of the North American Indians, as depicted by the early trav- 
elers in Canada ; a comparison which almost every commen- 
tator on Tacitus has instituted and verified. 

In most of the French writers, however, in G-ibbon's His- 
tory, and even in the lectures of M. G-uizot, Clovis and Clotaire 
sweep across the historic stage in the garb and character of 
heroes. Their campaigns are depicted in colors brilliant 
enough to reflect the glories of Napoleon. The doctrines of 
Aristotle and of Montesquieu are invoked to interpret to us 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 39 

the enigmas of their policy ; and the revohitions of their king- 
dom are announced in terms such as might fitly celebrate the 
overtlu'ow of the empire of the Caesars. 

"We may respect the national piety which thus desires to 
embellish the cradle of the monarchy of France, but we can 
hardly acknowledge the discretion of the attempt. Our own 
national exultation in the greatness of those Norman dukes 
who wore the English crown, but were known to England 
only as conquerors, as alietis, and as oppressors, is sober and 
rational in comparison ; for our Norman monarchs were at 
least men of courteous manners, of cultivated minds, and of 
lofty purposes. Clovis was an untutored savage. He exhib- 
ited, in their darkest aspect, the worst vices of savage life. 
In peace and in war his hands were ever stained with blood. 
At the close of his reign he assassinated every chief of his 
tribe from whom his children had any rivalry to apprehend. 
The most pathetic and heart-subduing motives of the religion 
which he had embraced were insufficient to tame his ferocity. 
Even the evangelical narrative of the sacrifice of Calvary drew 
from him no other than the well-known exclamation, " Si ego 
ibidem cum Frankis meis fuissem, injurias ejus vindicassem !" 
His feebler descendants abandoned themselves to intemperance 
and debauchery, the only amusements of which they were ca- 
pable. There is no reason to suppose that any of them had ever 
learned to read ; for even Charlemagne himself (as Mabillon 
assures us) could not write, but " made a mark like an hon- 
est and plain-dealing man." "War was the single art in which 
the Merovingian princes ever attained any proficiency, and even 
their warfare was an exhibition of savage craft and valor, not of 
any skill in strategy. Sidonius Appollinaris saw and has de- 
lineated one of then military bands. He describes the host as 
bareheaded, with masses of long red hah falling between their 
shoulders, their bodies tightly girt about with raw hides, though 
naked from the knee downward, carrying neither slings nor 
bows, nor other missiles, except a hatchet and a short pike, to 
which was strung a barbed harpoon, marching on foot, and 
protected by no defensive armor. Occasionally, says Sidonius, 
one and another warrior, in an excess of martial phrensy, would 
rush forward to meet inevitable death, fighting to the last with 
more than human energy, amid the war songs and acclama- 
tions of their comrades. 



40 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

Sucli was the commander and such the followers by whom 
the Romano- Gallic provmce was suhdued. If opposed by the 
legions of Rome, they would have fallen at the first shock of so 
unequal an encounter. But the legions had been withdrawn 
into Italy for the defense of the heart of the empire. If opposed 
by any national movement of the free inhabitants of G-aul, such 
invaders must have been repelled by the military skill and or- 
ganization of so comparatively civilized a people. But the na- 
tional spu'it had departed ; and even among that gallant race 
the mere mstinct of animal courage was, for the moment, ex- 
tinct. In Armorica, and there alone, a warlike and unconquer- 
ed people of the old G-allic lineage were still to be found. 
Their progenitors had taken refuge there from the western pen- 
insula of Britain, in order to escape the oppressions of the Roman 
conquerors. The descendants of those fugitives opposed an im- 
penetrable front to Clovis and his hordes. They refused to be 
the victims, but consented to be the partakers of his spolia- 
tions ; and, by allying themselves to the conqueror, succeeded 
in transmitting to their posterity the independence which they 
maintained during so many following ages under their native 
dukes. 

But in every other part of G-aul, Roman oppression had done 
its work. The curse of fiscal tyranny had depopulated exten- 
sive districts, had stricken the land with barrenness, had swept 
away all the smaller proprietors, had degraded into slaves the 
actual cultivators of the soil, and had broken asunder the bonds 
by which the wealthy and the poor had once been united ; and 
now, when the very name and shadow of the empire was de- 
parting, the fairest of her former possessions awaited, as a help- 
less prey, the first formidable arm and resolute will which 
should assert a sovereignty over it. The people submissively 
accepted, on liis own terms, the shelter of the government, or, 
rather, the defense of the sword of Clvois. He triumphed over 
them neither by military skill, nor by extensive resources, nor 
by sublime audacity, nor by any other of the powers which 
usually attended the march of conquerors, but simply because, 
no longer retaining either the means or the desire to assert their 
national independence, they stood in need of a sovereign on 
whose protection they might depend, and to whose supremacy 
they might bow ; and because Clovis, and he alone, presented 
himself to assume the abdicated diadem of the Caesars. 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 41 

The Frankisli conquest of tlie south and of the east of G-aul, 
however, presented greater difficulties, and requires some less 
ohvious explanation. The G-oths and the Burgundians resist- 
ed the new^ invaders with a spirit as resolute as their own. It 
was a conflict, not of free Grermans with enervated Grauls, hut 
of the different Teutonic trihes with each other ; and, in that 
conflict, the Franks were inferior to their enemies both in me- 
chanical arts and in mental culture. Yet so complete and so 
rapid was their triumph, that, within a few years from the 
death of Clovis, his sons were acknowledged as kings over the 
whole of what had once formed the Romano-Grallic province. 
To what cause, then, less imposing than the genius and the 
power of the Merovingian princes, can this unbroken series 
of victories be ascribed ? 

It may be ascribed, in part, to the religious enthusiasm which 
animated the assault of the Franks on those whom they abhor- 
red as the enemies of Heaven, and whose destruction they re- 
garded as a sacrifice not less grateful to the Deity than to them- 
selves. But it is to be ascribed chiefly to those social distinc- 
tions which separated the aggressive and the defensive belliger- 
ents from each other — ^the Franks, who had recently emerged 
from their native forests, from the G-oths and Burgundians 
who had long inhabited their G-allic settlements ; the first, a 
succession of armed bands, whose families and cattle remained 
far off and secure in their G-erman fastnesses ; the second, a 
body of agricultural colonists, who, with their households and 
their herds, were living in wide dispersion from each other. 
On the one side were armies, ill equipped indeed, ill organized, 
and ill commanded ; on the other side, a rural population hast- 
ily summoned to the use of weapons which they had long laid 
aside, and to the discharge of military duties with which dis- 
use had rendered them unfamiliar. The universal experience 
of mankind sufficiently attests that the issue of war, when 
waged between such combatants, is never really doubtful. 

But in the wars which Clovis and his sons carried on with 
the G-ermanic tribes to the eastward of the Rhine, they are rep- 
resented by their modern French eulogists as having been gift- 
ed at once with the wide-ranging sight of great captains and 
the prophetic sight of great statesmen. They are supposed to 
Lave engaged in these contests, not from any vulgar cupidity 



42 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

for plunder or for power, but in order to subdue the nations 
from whom they would have otherwise had to apprehend new 
barbaric irruptions into Graul. They are therefore described as 
imitating the policy of Tiberius, and as anticipating that of 
Charlemagne. I have attempted in vain to verify these discov- 
eries. The battles fought between the Cis-E,henane Franks 
and the Trans -Rhenane G-ermans were not the conflicts of or- 
ganized armies so much as the onslaughts of hostile tribes. 
Even the much celebrated combat of Tolbiac, which repelled 
the Alemanni and destroyed a multitude of their warriors, was 
a military achievement to be compared, not with the actions of 
Conde or Turenne, but rather with the recent victories of the 
Zooloo chief Dingaan over the forces of the Kaffir tribes in 
Southern Africa ; for Dingaan brought into the field as many 
followers as Clovis, equipped in a manner not dissimilar, and 
commanded with at least equal military skill. 

In the same manner, when we read of treaties by which the 
Frankish dommion was extended, by the sons of Clovis, over 
a large part of Germany, we must not call up the image, or 
the remembrance, of the congresses and conventions of Utrecht 
or of Vienna. From the age of Tacitus, the Grerman people 
had been divided into many petty tribes, which had been ag- 
gregated into several great confederacies. Allured or alarmed 
by the conquest of Gaul, the tribes of Bavaria, of Suabia, and 
of Franconia consented to become members of the Frankish 
confederacy by whom that conquest had been achieved. This 
is the simple and unadorned explanation of the international 
compacts of which the French historians make then- boast. 
Placed as we are beyond the influence of that antiquarian na- 
tionality which has converted the founders of the first dynasty 
of France into heroes and statesmen, diplomatists and philos- 
ophers, we may venture to regard the G-erman Kyning as but 
the rude and shapeless germ of the European King, and may 
own our belief that his wars were but the levying of so much 
black mail ; that his negotiations were but so many palavers ; 
and that between the long-haired Merovings and the princes 
of the house of Bourbon, there was little more in common 
than between the Indian chief who scalped his enemies on the 
banks of the Potomac and the President of the United States 
of America. 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 43 

These general conclusions do not rest upon the collation of 
the works of many authors, but chiefly on the testimonies of 
two — of Sidonius (that is) and of G-regory of Tours, to whom 
alone we are indebted for almost all which is known of the in- 
ternal condition of Graul under the dynasty of the Merovings. 
Of the opinions and portraits of Sidonius we have already 
seen something, and I shall refer to them again in the sequel. 
G-regory was elected to be bishop of Tours about the year 566. 
Seven years after his election, he began the composition of his 
history, • It comprises an account of the remarkable events 
which occurred m G-aul from the year 395 to the year 591 — 
a period embracing about a century and a half from the ear- 
liest Prankish conquests. Of many of those events the histo- 
rian was himself an eye-witness. He died in the year 594. 

It is impossible for me at this moment to lay before you 
any of the many narratives to be found in the nine books of 
G-regory's history, which might be quoted in support of the 
general statement that the Frankish conquerors of Gaul held 
no higher place in the scale of civilisation than the savages 
of the Eocky Mountains or of Caffraria. For any such quo- 
tations I gladly substitute the following summary of G-rego- 
ry's testimony on the subject, which I borrow from the fifth 
chapter of the first volume of M. Fauriel's History of the Pro- 
vencal Poetry : J' Such of the Romano-G-allic people, whether 
laics or ecclesiastics, as enjoyed any influence from the supe- 
riority either of their rank or of their intelligence, endeavored 
to render the Frankish conquest subservient to the welfare 
both of the conquered and of the conquering people. But the 
barbarous chiefs of those conquerors exercised their dominion 
as a mere brute force, concentrated entirely in their own per- 
sons. They employed it as an instrument for satisfying their 
unbridled passions, their insatiable cupidity, and their brutal 
ardor for the sensual enjoyments of life. The chiefs attacked, 
butchered, and despoiled one another. Their Leudes (that is, 
their officers and agents), abhorring a power opposed to all 
their G-ermanic ideas and habits, conspu-ed against them, re- 
sisted then* authority, and made it their constant object to con- 
vert into an absolute ownership the revocable interest which 
had been assigned to them in the spoils and honors of the con- 
quest ; while many of them, making common cause with the 



44 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

conquered people placed under tlieir command, were engaged 
in ceaseless revolts against the Merovingian kings, until tliey 
had entirely thrown off their authority." 

I anticipate the inquiry. To what purpose consume our time 
in studying the history of the Prankish dynasties, if they were 
really conducted by rulers thus barbarous, having for their 
subjects tribes thus uncivilized ? I answer that the study is 
important, because, barbarous as they were, they were chosen 
by the Supreme Ruler of the Nations to lay the basis of that 
great European commonwealth, to every pulse of which the 
whole civilized world has been so long accustomed to vibrate ; 
because they were intermingled with the Grallic races, among 
whom many remains of the old Roman civilization still lin- 
gered ; and because, from the vicissitudes of their fortunes 
and the spirit of their institutions eventually sprang those pol- 
ities. Feudal and Papal, which have left their indelible impress 
on the history and condition of the whole Christian world. I 
believe, therefore, that we shall do wisely in following the 
steps of those great historians who have employed themselves 
in interpreting the causes of the subversion of the dynasty of 
Clovis, and in that belief I proceed to offer what occurs to my- 
self as most material in explanation of that much-debated ca- 
tastrophe. 

First, then, I observe that the Frankish conquest of the 
Romano-G-allic province was never completely accomplished ; 
for, in addition to the antipathy which alienated the Franks 
from the G-auls — ^the dominant from the subject race — they 
were farther divided from each other by the indelible contrast 
of their characters, national and hereditary. In the Merovin- 
gian, as in every other age, the Gauls were animated by a 
courage which (when unchilled by oppression and slavery) was 
of an almost incomparable ardor. Keenly susceptible of ev- 
ery kind of impulse, impelled into speech and action by a rest- 
less constitutional vivacity, fickle of purpose, impatient of the 
tranquil rule of law, and involved in perpetual disunions with 
each other, this ingenious, volatile, enthusiastic race might 
seem to have been molded by the hand of Nature herself, as 
a living antithesis to their Teutonic conquerors. The subtle, 
insinuating, and courteous G-aul despised, even while he obey- 
ed, the sluggish, simple-minded G-erman, and found inexhaust- 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 45 

ible food for ridicvile in liis blunt speecli and plilegmatio de- 
meanor. The G-aul yielded himself recklessly to every gust 
of emotion. The G-erman lived under the control of passions 
as measured in their outward manifestation as they were fer- 
vent and enduring in reality. The Graul habitually displayed 
what, in the more abstruse idiom of the modern French tongue, 
would be called a strong development of the sense of individ- 
uality, or, in our homelier English, was egregiously vain. 
The G-erman neither rendered nor coveted any idolatrous hom- 
age, but, meditating the interests of his nation or of his tribe, 
merged his own fame in theirs, and cheerfully abandoned his 
separate purposes to promote the designs of his associates in 
policy or in arms. 

Between the mercurial G-aul and his saturnine conqueror, 
amalgamation, whether social or political, was therefore of 
very tardy growth. The relation between them long resem- 
bled, and has not seldom been compared to that which the 
lively G-reek bore to his solemn Turkish master. To minister 
to the luxuries of the victorious barbarian, to play upon his 
weakness, to supply his lack of learning, and so to creep into 
all employments demanding a more than common address and 
mental culture, were arts practiced by the G-allic bondsman 
at Paris many ages before they were employed by the G-reek 
bondsman at Constantinople. And so it happened that, after 
the stranger had gained possession of his land, the G-aul insin- 
uated himself into almost every important office, judicial and 
ecclesiastical. The Meroving thus reigned over a state in 
which the great mass of the people regarded his rule with aver- 
sion and his person with contempt, and derided the convenient 
dullness which gave such ample scope to their own encroach- 
ing subtlety. 

Secondly. When Clovis became the conqueror of G-aul, he 
was not considered by himself or by others as having become 
the monarch of a definite territory, or even as having become, 
in the proper sense of the word, the Sovereign of the old Ro- 
mano-G-allic inhabitants. No attempt was made to impose 
upon the conquered people the laws, the language, or the cus- 
toms of the conquerors. Sometimes, indeed, the privileges of 
Frankish birth were granted to individual Gauls, but each of 
them was free, if so it pleased him, to live under the ancient 



46 ■ THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

laws of Rome, and to observe the legal customs of the Roman 
empire ; for in that age law was considered not as a local, 
tut as a personal distinction ; and in respect of the code, penal 
and civil, under which they lived, the two races were thus sep- 
arated from each other, after the conquest of G-aul, precisely 
as they had been separated before. 

Thirdly. There was no system of civil administrative gov- 
ernment of which the Merovingian Kyning was the head, or to 
which the provincial G-auls were subordinated. Under the 
Romans, G-aul had been divided into cities and rural prov- 
inces. In the cities and their suburbs, all local affairs had 
been conducted by municipalities, bearing no rude analogy to 
that of Rome herself ; while in each rural province, the impe- 
rial authority had been represented and administered by a Dux 
or Comes, or a Yicecomes. After the conquest, the Frank 
Herizog superseded the duke. The Frank Grraf took the place 
of the count or viscount, and claimed in every city an author- 
ity co-ordinate with that of the old municipal magistrates. But 
the Herizog and the Grraf did not maintain with the Kyning 
relations corresponding with those which the duke or count 
had maintained with the emperor. The G-erman viceroy raised 
the military recruits for which his district or city was liable, 
but made no other practical acknowledgment of responsibility 
or subordination to the Kyning, or to any other human being. 
Each Herizog and Grraf was regarded as supreme, or at least 
as independent, within the limits of his own command ; for 
although in the administration of justice he associated to him- 
self Rakenburghs, that is, eminent persons of Gallic birth, 
without whose concurrence no judgment for or against any 
G-aul could be pronounced, yet from the judgments of the 
Herizog or Graf, and of the Rakenburghs, there was no ap- 
peal either to the Merovingian king, or to any officer of his 
appointment. 

Fourthly. Destitute as the Kyning thus was of all civil and 
judicial authority, he was equally powerless in the government 
of the Church. Her bishops and ministers were elected by the 
people at large, and provincial synods promulgated ecclesias- 
tical laws without any preceding or retrospective sanction 
from the temporal sovereign. 

Fifthly. Negotiations and alliances with foreign states were 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 47 

equally beyond his province, for as yet diplomacy and diplo- 
matic relations were not. Nor was he the conservator of the 
peace of his people, for he had neither magistrates nor police 
under his orders. Nor was he the author of public works, for 
in those ages none such were ever undertaken or projected. 

Sixthly. To these defects of the royal power it must be 
added, that the Merovingian king was not the legislator for 
his people ; or, rather, that there was in those ages no G-allo- 
Erankish Legislature whatever. This is, indeed, to contradict 
a prevalent opinion. It is usually supposed that each of the 
Grerman tribes, on its entrance into G-aul, promulgated there 
the ancient code of their nation, and afterward introduced mto 
that code such amendments as experience suggested. No sup- 
position, however, can be more erroneous, than that the G-othic, 
Salian, Ripuarian, and Burgundian codes were ever established 
(as the Code Napoleon, for example, was established) by the 
deliberate act of a formal Legislature. They were recapitu- 
lated, or, in modern, phrase, were edited, by aged men, as me- 
morials of the customs of their father-land ; and in this office 
they availed themselves of the aid of G-auls, who alone were 
qualified both to give a permanent form to those unwritten 
traditions, and to adapt them to the new circumstances in 
which the Frankish tribes were placed. These compilations 
seem to have been received very much as our own forefathers 
received the institutes of Bracton, of Fleta, and of Littleton. 

From the co-operation of G-allic and of German compilers 
of these codes, it happened that each of them was more or less 
compounded of two distinct elements — the one the barbaric 
traditions, the other the Roman jurisprudence. Nor is it at 
all difficult, especially with the aid of the very learned Savig- 
ny, to perceive how the greater or less predominance of the 
Roman element coincides with the greater or less civilization 
of the people for whose use each code was so promulgated. 
Accordingly, the G-othio drew most copiously, and the Salian 
code least extensively, from the Corpus Juris Civilis ; while 
the ideas of savage life pervaded the Salian compilation most 
completely, and the G-othic in the smallest measure. Yet in 
all of these collections of laws or customs, those ideas exer- 
cised a commanding influence. They were all, to a great ex- 
tent, the barbarous laws of a barbarous people. They all, for 



48 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

example, proceed on the assumption that crime is an injury, 
not to the collective society, but to the individual sufferer ; that 
he or his surviving kindred have a natural and indefeasible 
right to take vengeance on the wrong-doer, and that the proper 
office of the law-giver is to secure the enforcement of this vin- 
dictive privilege, subject only to such restraints as may pre- 
vent the undue exercise or abuse of it. 

In those precious monuments of antiquity we have the 
most distinct records of the relations which subsisted in G-aul 
between the conquering and the conquered people. The 
milder Goths and Burgundians exacted from the homicide a 
fine of equal amount, whether the victim had been a G-erman 
or a Graul. The fiercer Franks doubled the penalty if the 
person slain had been one of their own nation. Comparatively 
equitable, the Goths and Burgundians guaranteed to the an- 
cient proprietors one third of their lands, and two thirds of the 
slaves attached to them. The less scrupulous Franks imposed 
no such restraint on their own cupidity. Perhaps, however, 
the comparative mildness of these more early invaders of Gaul 
may have been prompted, not by their superior civilization, nor 
by their greater equity, but by prudence, or even by necessity ; 
for we know that some of their concessions to the conquered 
people were extorted from their fears ; and it does not seem 
unreasonable to conjecture, that, in other cases, the Goths 
and Burgundians were less oppressive than the Franks, merely 
because they were less able to practice oppression with im- 
punity. 

At present, however, I touch on this large subject of the 
Germanic codes only with a view to the remark that the 
authorship of them is not due to the Merovingian kings or 
chieftains. "We might with equal reason ascribe the com- 
mentaries of Sir Edward Coke to the first British sovereiofn of 
the family of Stuart. 

The character of legislators is, however, ascribed to Clovis 
and his royal descendants on the ground of the enactments 
which are supposed to have been made at their suggestion at 
the Champs de Mars, or annual comitia of the Franks. In 
order to estimate this pretension aright, we must inquire what 
those assemblies really were ? 

The words of Tacitus are, " De minoribus rebus principes 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 49 

consnltant, de majoribus omnes ; ita tamen ut ea quoque, 
quorum penes plebem arbitrium est, apucl principes pertrao- 
tentur." Perhaps no English word corresponds so nearly to 
the word " principes" in thig passage as our term " chieftain," 
nor have we any better equivalent for the words "omnes" 
and "plebem," as here used, than that of "clansmen." But 
at these gatherings of the patriarchal chieftain and his clan, 
legislation was neither the single, nor the principal, nor the 
ordinary, nor perhaps even the occasional object. For in 
Tacitus again we read, " Licet apud concilium accusare quo- 
que, et discrimen capitis intendere. Eliguntiir in iisdem 
comitiis et principes qui jura per pagos, vicosque, reddunt." 
It is, therefore, ascertained that these assemblies tried crimi- 
nals and elected judges ; but that they ever enacted permanent 
laws, is little more than a conjecture. Whatever the actual 
business of such meetings may have been, we know, however, 
from the same authority, that attendance at them was often 
rendered tardily and with reluctance. " Illud ex libertate vi- 
tium, quod non simul, nee, ut jussi, conveniunt, sed et alter 
et tertius dies, cunctatione coeuntium consumitur." 

Now when this national institute of the German tribes was 
transplanted into Gaul, it did not strike root and germinate in 
that foreign soil without abundant indications of having under- 
gone an unhealthful change ; for, first, the Princeps or chief- 
tain found himself in a new position. He was no longer 
dwelling in the secure circle of his own patriarchal family. 
He had been constrained to receive among them many of the 
ancient Gallic inhabitants to aid in the cultivation of his iso- 
lated settlement, and many armed warriors to assist in the 
defense of it. The obedience of his dependents could, there- 
fore, no longer be maintained by the unaided bonds of filial 
or domestic piety. As he ruled over a body far more numer- 
ous and far more discordant than his ancient sept or clan, so 
he invoked the aid of other arms than those of duty, reverence, 
and attachment. As he exercised an authority at once more 
rigid and more precarious than in his native forest, so the re- 
luctance with whitsh even there he had attended the comitia 
of his people continually increased. He was unwilling to in- 
cur the toil of journeys of such unwonted distance, to expose 
his home to the hazards of his protracted absence from it, or 

D 



50 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

to exchange the dignity which he enjoyed there for the subor- 
dination and comparative insignificance which awaited him at 
the general assembly. 

The coniitia, or Champs de Mars, of the Franks in Graul 
being thus deserted by the chieftains of the more distant clans, 
became, in fact, nothing more than councils of war. Sidonius 
has left us a description of such an assembly, at which he was 
himself present at Toulouse. He calls it " concilium seni- 
orum," and has drawn it in colors deepened probably by the 
contempt of the polished Roman for these rude barbarians. 
He paints them as a squalid group, squatting on the bare 
ground, coarse and dirty in their persons, clad in mean and 
tight vestments, and shod with sandals of raw hides. G-regory 
of Tours has preserved a speech delivered by Clovis himself at 
such an assembly. In a few stern and pungent words, the 
royal orator exhorts the military congress to march to the con- 
quest of the G-othic Arians. The air rings with acclamations, 
and the king and his counselors, leaping up, are forthwith on 
their way to slay or to convert the heretics. 

The presumption that, during the lives of Clovis and his 
sons, these armed and tumultuous Parliaments did not really 
assume the grave office of legislation, is confirmed by the silence 
both of Sidonius and of Gregory on the subject ; and the 
writers of later times seem to be unanimous in the opinion, 
that after the death of Clovis and his sons, and during the 
reigns of all the later Merovingians, the Champs de Mars, or 
ancient Germanic assemblies, ceased to meet for any purpose 
whatever. On the whole, therefore, I conclude that the Me- 
rovings were not at any time the legislators for the Gallic 
people, and that there was not, in fact, in their times, any 
general Prankish Legislature. 

Seventhly. The Merovings were not administrators of 
finance, nor had they, in fact, any national revenue. This 
statement seems to me to admit of a ready explanation and 
a sufficient proof, eminent as are the authorities by which it 
is contradicted. 

For the reasons stated in my former lecture, the Franks, on 
their invasion of Gaul, found vast territories there desolate and 
abandoned by the plow. In those tracts of land the conquerors 
received the reward of their dangers and of their toils. Not 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 51 

seldom apparently they were also rewarded by tlie assignment 
to them of farms actually under cultivation. The estates 
thus acquired were called sortes, because they had been ap- 
portioned by lot. They were also called al-ods, because, in 
the case of each warrior, they constituted the whole of his 
gain or booty. These sortes, or al-ods, were held free from 
any rent or service, or other liability to any superior lord — an 
exemption from which the word " allodial" derives that pecu- 
liar meaning which belongs to it in the French law, as well 
as m ou.r own. 

After deducting from the entire surface of (xaul, first, these 
allodial lands, and, secondly, the tracts which the ancient in- 
habitants were permitted to retain, there remained a vast ex- 
tent of territory which was considered as the share in the gen- 
eral spoil wliich belonged to the Merovingian king. In various 
parts of this royal domain he had residences, to each of which 
was attached a considerable extent of cultivated land. Passing 
with his vast household from one of these estates to the other, 
he consumed, in turn, the harvests of each. 

On each were large bodies of slaves and of petty farmers, 
called coloni ; that is, serfs, adscripti glehce ; vendible with 
the soil and inseparable from it, and bound either to render 
fixed rents in kind, or to repair the houses, to till the lands, to 
tend the herds, to hunt the forests, and to fish the rivers of the 
lord. In addition to these resources, the king was accustom- 
ed, and, as some maintain, was entitled to receive from his 
principal chieftains annual presents of clothing, cattle, and the 
like. 

With no marine to maintain, no public works to construct, 
no stores or arsenals to supply, no judges, embassadors, min- 
isters, or civil servants to support, and no public debt to pay, 
a Merovingian king, possessing such ways and means as these, 
might well esteem himself affluent without a treasury, and rich 
without the command of a denarius. 

Yet he had to meet one great and still recurring exigency — 
he was the general of a considerable army ; and to ourselves 
no problem can appear so hopeless and intractable as that of 
keeping up such a force without the aid of a well-furnished 
exchequer. This difficulty, however familiar and obvious as 
it is to usj is of comparatively recent growth in modern Europe. 



52 THE DECLIKE AND FALL OF- 

Olii- Teutonic ancestors never heeded or acknowledged it. To 
serve liis captain in the field, and to subsist upon the spoils of 
the enemy, was at once the duty and the delight of every free 
G-erman. The Frank still confessed the duty, hut ceased to 
feel the delight, after he had become a settler in G-aul. His 
new sedentary occupations taught him to set a high value on 
the tranquil enjoyment of the fruits of his own labor. His 
spontaneous military ardor, therefore, died away. But the 
Kyning did not the less stand in need of his military services. 
It therefore became necessary to rekindle his passion for war 
by new incentives, and to enforce his presence in the camp by 
new obligations. 

Now, in their ancient G-erman settlements, the Merovingian 
king, and the principal chiefs subordinate to him, had all been 
surrounded by those companions who are designated by Taci- 
tus as Comites, and who called themselves Leudes or Antrus- 
tions. Such companions differed from each other in rank. 
" Gradus quinetiam et ipsi comitatus habet, judicio ejus quem 
sectantur." From this relation to their leader they at once re- 
ceived and imparted dignity: "Magnaque et comitum semula- 
tio, quibus, primus, apud principem suum, locus, et principum, 
cui plurimi et acerrimi comites. Hsec dignitas, hse vires, mag- 
no semper electorum juverium globo circumdari ; in pace de- 
cus in bello prsesidium." They were also accustomed to ex- 
pect and to receive military presents from their chieftain. 
" Exigunt enim • principis sui liberalitate, ilium bellatorem 
equum, ilium cruentam victricemque frameam." But he paid 
them no military stipend. " Nam epulse, et quanquam in- 
compti, largi tamen apparatus, pro stipendo cedunt. Materia 
munificentise per bella et raptus." In his new position, and 
desirous to provoke and to secure, rather than to reward the 
services of his companions, the Merovingian king, ceasing to 
bestow on them war-horses and shields, substituted the more 
substantial recompense of tracts of land carved out of his royal 
domain. • Instead of absolute gifts, he now made conditional 
grants. Li return for the land, the royal donor stipu^lated that 
he should receive, and the military companion bound himself 
to render warlike services of a prescribed duration and amount. 
The number of warriors whom each grantee pledged himself 
to supply and to equip, varied with the extent and the value 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 53 

of the lands conceded to liim. Such concessions were called 
beneficia. 

Volumes of controversy have heen written to determine 
whether such benefices were resumable at pleasure, or wheth- 
er they were held for a term of years, for life, or in perpetuity. 
Into this debate it is beside my immediate purpose to enter, 
farther than to express my own opinion that such grants were 
usually made without any distinct apprehension, on either side, 
as to the period for which they were to endure. It is, how- 
ever, certain that a protracted strife respecting the tenure of 
them arose between the Merovingian princes and the grantees. 
The princes maintained their right to resume such lands at 
their pleasure ; the grantees labored to render the tenure of 
them hereditary in their own families. In this contest the 
grantees were generally successful. But they succeeded only 
so far as to render their estates inheritable by their male heirs ; 
for in the Salian code was incorporated that memorable tradi- 
tion of the Franks : " De terra Salica in mulierem nulla portio 
hereditatus transit sed hoc virilis sexus acquirit ;" a provision 
which, in the fourteenth century, was successfully, though 
unreasonably, quoted to exclude all females from the right of 
succession to the crown of France. 

But whatever may have been the legal tenure of these ben- 
efices, my present object is to show that the military services 
due in respect of them gave to the Merovingian kings the 
means of recruiting, equipping, and maintaining their armies ; 
and that thus, even to meet the exigencies of war, they had 
no revenue, in the proper sense of that word, and were not de- 
pendent on any fiscal resources. 

Some French writers have indeed maintained that the old 
Roman taxes were levied in Gaul for the benefit of Clovis and 
his descendants. Of that fact, however, no proof has, I think, 
ever yet been adduced from any extant records ; and they who 
have searched the archives of France most diligently assert 
that no such proofs are to be found there. 

Since, then, the kings of the first or Merovingian race enjoy- 
ed none of the attributes of sovereignty with which we are 
familiar, it is difficult to say in what sense, or with what pro- 
priety the royal title is ascribed to them. We can not transfer 
our modern words kiag, reign, royalty, and the like, to their 



54 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

persons, or to such a dynasty as theirs, without weaving an 
inextricable web of verbal fallacies. By a king we, in these 
later ao-es, mean the head of a monarchical state, from whom 
all subordinate powers and dignities emanate, and to whom all 
other functionaries are amenable. But this complex idea is 
the tardy growth of time. By the word Kyning, the Franks 
meant simply the depository of any power, whether military 
or political. The word itself, as M. Thierry has shown, might 
be rendered into Latin with equal accuracy by the terms im- 
perator or consul, or dux or prmfectus, or by any synonym 
of these. In his native forest, the Merovingian Kyning was 
distinguished from other men by two attributes. First, he 
was the chief of a family which, in popular belief, derived their 
origin from the Scandinavian deities — a descent attested by 
the length and richness of his unpolled hair ; and, secondly, 
he was often, though not always, the chosen leader of the war- 
riors of his tribe, tlis "prerogatives," so to speak, were there- 
fore composed of his claim to religious veneration, and of his 
right to military obedience. He was a heaven-descended gen- 
eral rather than a king. The camp was his seat of empire. 
The soldiers quartered there, and they alone were, in the right 
sense of the word, his subjects. In the division of booty he 
was entitled to the largest share, in all festivities to the most 
conspicuous place, in every national assembly to the highest 
influence, and among the tribes of liis confederacy he was the 
foremost free m.an ; but he was not, in the modern sense of 
the word, their sovereign. He was honored, followed, and sup- 
ported by his people ; he did not reign over them. 

In whom, then, did the power over Graul really reside during 
that long interval in which the sceptre is usually supposed to 
have been held by Clovis and his posterity ? I answer that, 
from the warlike grasp of Clovis himself, all real dominion 
passed to the aristocracy, which he and his sons called into 
existence. It was composed, fii'st, of what may be called the 
Official aristocracy, that is, the Heri2;ogs and Grrafs, each rul- 
ing with an almost independent authority over the city or dis- 
trict assigned to him. It was composed, secondly, of what 
may be called the Patriarchal aristocracy ; that is, the chief- 
tains of clans settled with their families and followers on their 
sortes or allodial lands. And it was composed, tliirdly, of the 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 55 

Military aristocracy ; that is, the grantees of benefices, each 
having under his command a clan or tribe, collected from 
among his ancient companions in arms ; or, more briefly, Graul 
was apportioned among an aristocracy, official and territorial. 
The power of the territorial lords rested partly on the ancient 
traditions and patriarchal sentiments of the Grermanic people, 
and partly on two other main buttresses. First, in each set- 
tlement was held an assembly called a mallum, which met at 
short and frequent intervals, to deliberate and to decide on the 
affairs of the clan. The powers of these local comitia were 
vast and indefinite, and were employed to reduce the ancient 
Romano-Grallic inhabitants into a bondage which continually 
became more and more galling. Secondly, the great territorial: 
lords, imitating the example of the Merovingian kings, granted 
sub-benefices to their own leudes or companions. Thus each 
of the greater Prankish colonies in G-aul became a kind of im-. 
age in miniature of the Prankish empire itself; that is, every 
such colony was under the military command of a chieftain, 
under the guidance of a local assembly, and under the protec- 
tion of a body of warriors holding benefices on the condition 
of following their chief to battle. 

To this aristocracy, official and territorial, gradually passed 
the whole strength of the Merovingian state. Single chiefs 
combined in their own persons the two conditions of aristo- 
cratic power — governing several cities or districts, and possess- 
ing at the same time many extensive al-ods or benefices. By 
these combinations of governments and of territories in the 
same hands, was laid the basis of a power which, rapidly 
eclipsing every other, at length reduced the posterity of Clovis 
to insignificance and contempt. If those princes became rois 
faineants, it was because they had rien a faire. When he 
ceased to be the elected general of his nation, the Meroving 
became a mere cipher. Having fijst sacrificed his royal do- 
main to secure to himself the service of an army, he found 
himself deprived of the command of that army by the votes of 
the very grantees whom he had thus enriched. Nothing was 
then left to him which he could sacrifice, and nothing of which 
he could be deprived, except a title which had lost its mean- 
ing, and a homage which had become obsolete. The famous 
rescript of Pope Zachary, " that he who possessed the royal 



56 THEDECLINEANDFALLOF 

power miglit properly assume the royal dignity," overthrew 
not a living power, but a worn-out fiction. It was the con- 
summation in form of that which the course of events had al- 
ready accomplished in substance. 

To recur, then, to the question which I proposed at the com- 
mencement — "What were those abiding springs of action by the 
elastic power of which each of the Franco-Grallic dynasties 
successively arose with such similar energy, declined with 
such similar promptitude, fell into so similar a lifelessness, and 
made way for so similar an aristocratic usurpation ? 

The answer, .so far, at least, as relates to the Merovingian 
race, may be comprised in the single word — -Barbarism ; a 
word vague and indefinite indeed, yet the only compendious 
term by which we can designate that condition of human so- 
ciety in which government is maintained, not by love, or rev- 
erence, or policy, but, on the side of the ruler, by mere phys- 
ical force, and, on the side of the people, by abject terror. 
Under Clovis and his successors. Barbarism, so understood, 
vainly attempted the work of civilization. The untamed en- 
ergy of barbaric power subdued the Romano-G-allic province. 
Barbarian rapacity, regarding that conquest only as the spoil 
of war, seized and divided it among the strongest as their prey. 
Barbarian ignorance left untried whatever might have amal- 
gamated the vanquished G-auls and their victorious invaders 
into one united people. Barbarian recklessness transferred to 
a mighty empire the rude polity of an incoherent assemblage 
of uncivilized clans. The ideas. of the forest were transplant- 
ed into a soil utterly unsuited to their growth. The G-erman 
pastimes of war and of the chase were abandoned for seden- 
tary pursuits. The Grerman chieftain became a great propri- 
etor, and his followers degenerated into mercenary soldiers. 
The patriarchal government of the tribe could no longer be 
maintained. The national assemblies could not be brought 
together. The long-haired Merovings retained no more the 
hereditary homage of their tribes, but descended first into an 
unmeaning and then into a contemptible pageant. Gruided by 
no lights from experience, and by no maxims from forethought, 
the barbarous Prankish society resolved itself into its natural 
elements ; the strong subjugating the weak, to be themselves 
in turn brought into subjection by such as were stronger still 



THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 57 

than they. Each duke and count found in his civic or rural 
government a stronghold for assailing his neighbors and for his 
own defense. Each proprietor of allodial or of beneficial es- 
tates multiplied his armed retainers to aid or to oppose the 
forces of some other territorial lord. From this shock of hos- 
tile bands emerged at length that kind of peace which follows 
in every society upon the effective assertion by any one of its 
members of a strength too great for the successful resistance 
of the rest. By alliances, by wealth, by prowess, by military 
skill, and by policy, the house of Pepin gradually attained a 
power with which no other chief or combination of chiefs could 
any longer contend. The aristocracy had subverted the do- 
minion of the Merovingian Kyning, to be themselves subverted 
by the founder of the Carlo vingian dynasty. France has long 
been the theatre of experiments to graft new institutions upon 
a system of government, venerable at least for its antiquity, 
if for nothing else. The ill success of such experirnents, when 
made by Grerman Barbarism, was but an augury of the result 
of those similar attempts which in far distant ages were to be 
made by French Civilization. As we pursue the history of 
France, no truth will more frequently present itself to our no- 
tice than this — that the healthful growth of good government 
must be a spontaneous development from within, and not a 
compulsory envelopment from without. The antithesis is not 
merely verbal ; it is substantial also. 



58 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 



LECTURE III. 

ON THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 

In my last lecture, I endeavored to trace tlie sulDversion of 
the Merovingian Dynasty to the barbarism w^hich character- 
ized alike the princes of that race and their civil and military 
institutions. There v^as, however, nothing barbarous in the 
agency by which their overthrow was accomplished. We 
should search the history of mankind in vain for any series of 
four successive monarchs, following each other in a direct he- 
reditary lineage, to whom the praise of large capacity, of reso- 
lute purposes, and of splendid achievements, is so justly due 
as to Pepin of Heristal and his posterity to the third genera- 
tion. That the descendants, first of Clovis and then of Char- 
lemagne, pursued the same disastrous path to the same ulti- 
mate ruin, is, therefore, a coincidence which we may not as- 
cribe to any similarity in the views or in the character of their 
respective progenitors. For it is not without reason that pane- 
gyric has so exhausted her powers in celebrating the great 
founder of the Carlovingian empire ; and that, among the he- 
roes of former ages, his name alone enjoys a kind of double . 
immortality : the one, the deliberate award of history ; the 
other, the prodigal gift of fiction and romance. "What, then, 
were the causes which defeated even the genius of Charle- 
magne in his attempt to prolong, beyond his own life, either 
the empire which he restored, the polity which he established, 
or the code of laws which he promulgated ? To resolve that 
question, we must bear in mind that, in common with all the 
great actors on the theatre of the world, he lived, not in obedi- 
ence to occasional impulses, but under the government of cer- 
tain fixed rules and maxims of conduct ; that though some of 
these principles were the indigenous growth of his own mind, 
the greater part of them had been acquired by tradition from 
his ancestors ; that his character was far more derivative than 
original ; and that he himself was much rather tlie conductor 



CHARLEMAGNE. 59 

than tlie author of the influences which he exerted on the ages 
subsequent to his own. 

To understand aright the reign of Charlemagne, it is neces- 
sary, therefore, to begin by inquiring. What were the laws, 
and what the policy of his house, which descended to him from 
his forefathers as a patrimonial inheritance ? 

First, then, I observe that Charlemagne was an Austrasian ; 
that is, that he and his immediate ancestors belonged to that 
G-allic kingdom which, on the death of Clotaire I., was as- 
signed to Sigebert, the youngest of his sons. 

Among the tribes of the great Prankish confederacy which 
followed Clovis to the conquest of G-aul, the Salian and the 
Ripuarian were the chief. Being himself a Salian, Clovis 
placed the warriors of that race in possession of the largest 
and fairest portion of the conquered territory. Their settle- 
ments extended from the Meuse to the Loire, and embraced 
the whole of that part of Northern Graul in which the ancient 
E-omano- G-allic population were still numerous. In that region, 
the Salians, withdrawn far away from their native seats, be- 
came, in each succeeding generation, more and more estranged 
from the customs of their Grerman ancestors, and more and 
more familiar with the habits, laws, and language of the sub- 
jugated people. The conquerors fell into a kind of social 
thraldom to those over whom they had triumphed, and pro- 
gressively assumed a semi-Grallic and an unwarlike character. 

Now, even in their native forests, the Salian and the Ripu- 
arian Pranks had been broadly distinguished from each other. 
They observed many different customs, and made use of dis- 
similar dialects of the Teutonic tons^ue. After then' misfra- 
tions to the westward of the Rhine, these varieties were in- 
creased and multiplied, and at length were exasperated into 
mutual animosities and distrusts. Dwelling apart between 
the Meuse and the Rhine, the Ripuarians preserved their prim- 
itive language from any foreign alloy, revered the traditions 
of their ancestors, perpetuated their ancient usages, and were 
constantly forming new relations, pacific or belligerent, with 
the tribes residing in the interior of Grermany. 

On the death of the first Clotaire, and the consequent par- 
tition of Gaul between his four sons, the contrast and the 
jealousies between these two chief Prankish tribes induced a 



60 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

territorial arrangement, wliicli ultimately brought them into a 
hostile attitude toward each other. An imaginary line was 
rudely drawn from the mouths of the Scheldt to near the 
sources of the Auhe. The country to the west of that line 
acquired the name of Neustria ; the country to the east of it 
the name of Austrasia. "With no very material inaccuracy, 
Neustria might have heen called Salian G-aul, and Austrasia 
Ripuarian GrauL Before the end of the sixth century, they 
had become two distinct states, at once kindred and allied, 
rival and hostile to each other — kindred and allied, as the 
principal members of the great Frankish confederation — ^rival 
and hostile, as competitors for superiority over all the trihes 
of which it was composed. The military and political history 
of Graul during the seventh century comprises little more *than 
the record of the conflict between Neustria and Austrasia for 
that pre-eminence. It issued in the triumph of the Austrasi- 
ans. They vanquished Western and Southern G-aul by the 
same means which had assured to Clovis and his followers the 
conquest of the Romano-Grallic province. It was, in fact, a 
second G-ermanic invasion. The untamed energy of the G-er- 
man race, continually recruited by new G-erman auxiliaries, 
once again beat down the resistance of a people who, while 
advancing in the arts of civilized life, had declined in the 
hardihood, the courage, and the warlike discipline of their un- 
civilized progenitors. But the Austrasian conquest of G-aul 
was chiefly effected by the genius of that illustrious family, 
of which Pepin of Heristal was the first, and Charlemagne the 
second founder ; nor is it difficult to estimate the nature or the 
strength of the influence which that circumstance exercised 
on the whole system of his political life and government. 

Secondly. With such a descent Charlemagne was predis- 
posed to what, in modern phraseology, would be called a "con- 
stitutional" policy ; an expression which, however inapt and 
inappropriate, may stand in the place of a long periphrasis. 
Pepin of Heristal, though combining in his own person the 
real government, civil and military, over the whole of the Fran- 
co-Gallic state, had borne no higher title than that of Duke of 
Austrasia and Mayor of the Palace in Neustria and Burgundy. 
He had governed, not by material force, nor by the reverence 
of ancient superstition, nor by the influence of hereditary right, 



CHARLEMAGNE. 6l 

nor by tlie fascinations which attend the pomp and majesty of 
the diadem. On the contrary, in Neustria and Burgundy, his 
strength consisted in propitiating the Franks by his habitual 
respect to the empty name, and to the faint shadow of royalty 
m the race of the long-haired Merovings. But in Austrasia he 
sustained his power by popular arts, and especially by reviving 
among the people the free assemblies of their German ances- 
tors. This regard of Pepin of Heristal to what I have ven- 
tured to call constitutional habits, descended, as one of the 
traditions of his house, to Charlemagne. 

Thu'dly. Charlemagne inherited from Charles Martel, his 
grandfather, two other maxims, of what, in modern language, 
would be called foreign or diplomatic policy. Of these the one 
was, that the Prankish power could be maintained only by 
anticipating those invasions with which G-aul was again men- 
aced by the barbarians who hung upon her frontiers, and by 
crushing them in their own fastnesses. The other was, that, 
in order to repel these tlu'eatened incursions, and to advance 
the ambitious prospects of the Carlovingian house, it was ne- 
cessary to seek the alliance of such civilized states or poten- 
tates as could, in that age, be conciliated, either in Asia or in 
Europe. Charles Martel inculcated these lessons, not perhaps 
as formal precepts, but by a life of unremitting war and nego- 
tiation. Year after year he carried fire and sword among the 
Saxon confederacy, from the mouths of the Elbe to those of 
the Oder ; and then rapidly passing to the south, he again and 
again encountered, repelled, and destroyed the Saracens. He 
entered into friendly relations with the King of Lombardy, 
with Leo the Isaurian and Iconoclast, and with the Pope ; 
who, in gratitude to him as the deliverer of Europe, transmit- 
ted to liim (so the ecclesiastical historians assure us) the very 
keys once borne by St. Peter, and the very cords with which 
the apostle had been bound during his imprisonment at Rome. 
Yet Charles Martel occupied no enviable place in the estima- 
tion of the churchmen of his age. In his Saracenic wars, he' 
had maintained his army by a sacrilegious seizure and division 
of ecclesiastical property among his soldiers ; and we read that, 
after the death of Charles, St. Eucharius announced that, while 
rapt into a state of visionary existence, he had himself been an 
eye-witness of the sufferings which that great conqueror was 



62 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

undergoing, and would never cease to endure, as the punish- 
ment for his impiety. Other teachers, scarcely less eminent 
than St. Eucharius, solemnly affirmed the same fact. Nor were 
these monastic reveries as unimportant as they were idle. Por, 

Fourthly, from the experience of his father, and in no small 
degree, as it seems, from the terror excited by these legends, 
Pepin-le-Bref, the son of Charles Martel, adopted and transmit- 
ted to^ Charlemagne another maxim, still more valuable than 
any of those which had before been introduced into the heredi- 
tary code of their family. It was the maxim that the sup- 
port of the Church was indispensable to the transfer of the 
Prankish diadem from the Merovingian to the Carlovingian 
race. Or, it may be said to have been the maxim, that, in 
order to encounter and subvert the reverence which was still 
yielded to a merely titular monarch, the supposed descendant 
of the gods, it was necessary to enlist on their own side relig- 
ious feelings of a far deeper nature and of a much more sol- 
emn significance. 

Pepin-le-Bref lived to establish and illustrate the truth of 
this opinion. Like his forefathers, he still exhibited, for the 
homage of the Franks, the phantom of a Merovingian king ; 
though he judiciously selected for that purpose Childeric III., 
whose personal qualities were precisely those which would 
most surely provoke, and most completely justify, the con- 
tempt of his people. Like his father and grandfather, Pepin- 
le-Bref convened the national assemblies of the Franks with 
strict punctuality, and attended them with studious respect. 
Like his progenitors, also, he invaded the Saxons, the Alle- 
manni, and the Bavarians ; and courted the alliance of Con- 
stantinople and of Pavia. But in his relations with the Church 
he far exceeded all the examples of his ancestors. He afforded 
the most zealous support to Boniface, and to the other Christian 
missionaries in Grermany. He not merely assigned a place in 
the national assemblies to the bishops and clergy of G-aul, but 
secured to them the highest rank and authority there. He 
made such atonement as was in his power for the sacrilegious 
spoliations of his father. He twice crossed the Alps to rescue 
Home from the grasp of the King of Lombardy ; and he con- 
ferred on the Pope and his successors that territorial dominion 
which, during one thousand successive years, has been the 



CHARLEMAGNE. 63 

"bulwark of their independence and their power. In grateful 
acknowledgment of these services, the sentence of Pope Zacha- 
ry, and the hands of Boniface, placed the crown of Childerio 
on the brows of Pepin ; and while the last of the Merovingians 
sought shelter in a monastery, a papal anathema consigned to 
the most fearful of all punishments any one who should pre- 
sume to dispute the title of the first of the Carlovingians to 
the kingdom of Graul. 

The political maxims which Charlemagne thus acquired by 
tradition and inheritance had, to a certain extent, become ob- 
solete when he himself succeeded to the power of his ancestors, 
and to the crown of his father Pepin. It was then no longer 
necessary to practice these hereditary arts with a view to the 
great prize to which they had so long been subservient. But 
the maxims by which the Carlovingian sceptre had been won, 
were not less necessary in order to defend and to retain it. 
They afford the key to more than half of the history of the 
great conqueror from whom that dynasty derives its name. 
The cardinal points to which, tlu'oughout his long and glorious 
reign, his mind was dhected with an inflexible tenacity of pur- 
pose, were precisely those toward which his forefathers had 
bent their attention. They were, to conciliate the attachment 
of his G-erman subjects, by studiously maintaining their old 
Grermanic institutions ; to anticipate mstead of awaiting the 
invasions of the barbarous nations by whom he was surround- 
ed ; to court the alliance and support of all other secular po- 
tentates of the Bast and "West; and to strengthen his own 
power by the most ultimate relations with the Church. 

I have, however, aheady observed that Charlemagne had 
other rules or habits of conduct which were the indigenous 
growth of his own mind. It was only in a mind of surpassing 
depth and fertility that such maxims could have been nur- 
tured and made to yield their appropriate fruits ; for, first, 
he fu'mly believed that the power of his house could have no 
secure basis except in the religious, moral, and intellectual 
and social improvement of his subjects ; and, secondly, he was 
no less fu'mly persuaded that, in order to that improvement, 
it was necessary to consolidate all temporal authority m Eu- 
rope by the reconstruction of the Csesarian empire — that em- 
pire, beneath the shelter of which, religion, law, and learning 



64 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

had so long and so widely flourished throughout the domin- 
ions of imperial Rome. 

Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom the 
title of " The G-reat" has been given, Charlemagne alone has 
retained it as a permanent addition to his name. The reason 
may perhaps be, that in no other man were ever united, in so 
large a measure, and in such perfect harmony, the qualities 
which, in their combination, constitute the heroic character, 
such as energy, or the love of action ; ambition, or the love of 
power ; curiosity, or the love of knowledge ; and sensibility, 
or the love of pleasure — not, indeed, the love of forbidden, of 
unhallowed, or of enervating pleasure, but the keen relish for 
those blameless delights by which the burdened mind and jad- 
ed spirits recruit and renovate their powers — delights of which 
none are susceptible in the highest degree but those whose 
more serious pursuits are sustained by the highest motives, 
and directed toward the highest ends ; for the charms of so- 
cial intercourse, the play of a buoyant fancy, the exhilaration 
of honest mirth, and even the refreshment of athletic exercises, 
require, for their perfect enjoyment, that robust and absolute 
health of body and of mind, which none but the noblest na- 
tures possess, and in the possession of which Charlemagne ex- 
ceeded all other men. 

His lofty stature, his open countenance, his large and brill- 
iant eyes, and the dome-like structure of his head, imparted, 
as we learn from Eginhard, to all his attitudes the dignity 
which becomes a king, relieved by the graceful activity of a 
practiced warrior. He was stjll a stranger to every form of 
bodily disease when he entered on his seventieth year; and 
although he was thenceforward constrained ^to pay the usual 
tribute to sickness and to pain, he maintained to the last a 
contempt for the whole materia medica, and for the dispensers 
of it, which Moliere himself, in his gayest mood, might have 
envied. In defiance of the gout, he still followed the chase, and 
still provoked his comrades to emulate his feats in swimming ; 
as though the iron frame which had endured nearly threescore 
campaigns had been incapable of lassitude, and exempt from 
decay. 

In the monastery of St. G-all, near the Lake of Constance, 
there was living in the nmth century a monk, who relieved 



CHARLEMAGNE. 65 

the tedium of his monotonous life, and got the better, as he 
tells us, of much constitutional laziness, by collecting anec- 
dotes of the mighty monarch, with whose departed glories the 
world was at that time ringing. In his amusing legend, Charle- 
magne, the conqueror, the legislator, the patron of learning, 
and the restorer of the empire, makes way for Charlemagne 
the joyous companion ; amusing himself with the comedy, or 
rather with the farce, of life, and contributing to it not a few 
practical jokes, which sta^id in most whimsical contrast with 
the imperial dignity of the jester. Thus, when he commands 
a whole levy of his blandest courtiers, plumed, and furred, and 
silken as they stood, to follow him in the chase through sleet 
and tempest, mud and brambles ; or constrains an unhappy 
chorister, who had forgotten his responses, to imitate the other 
members of the choir by a long series of mute grimaces ; or 
concerts with a Jew peddler a scheme for palming off, at an 
enormous price, on an Episcopal virtuoso, an embalmed rat, as 
an animal till then unknown to any naturalist — these, and 
many similar facetiae, which in any other hands might have 
seemed mere childish frivolities, reveal to us, in the illustrious 
author of them, that native alacrity of spkit and child-like 
glee, which neither age, nor cares, nor toil could subdue, and 
which not even the oppressive pomps of royalty were able to 
suffocate. 

Nor was the heart which bounded thus lightly after whim 
or merriment less apt to yearn with tenderness over the inte- 
rior circle of his home. While yet a child, he had been borne 
on men's shoulders, in a buckler for his cradle, to accompany 
his father in his wars ; and in later hfe, he had many a strange 
tale to tell of his father's achievements. "With his mother 
Bertha, the long-footed, he lived in an affectionate and rever- 
end intimacy, which never knew a pause except on one occa- 
sion, which may perhaps apologize for some breach even of 
filial reverence, for Bertha had insisted on giving him a wife 
against his own consent. His own parental affections were 
indulged too fondly and too long, and were fatal both to the 
immediate objects of them and to his own tranquillity. But 
with Eginhard, and Alcuin, and the other associates of his se- 
verer labors, he maintained that grave and enduring friend- 
ship, which can be created only on the basis of the most pro- 

E 



66 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

found esteem, and wliich can be developed only by that free 
interchange of thought and feeling which implies the tempo- 
rary forgetfulness of all the conventional distinctions of rank 
and dignity. 

It was a retributive justice which left Gribbon to deform with 
such revolting obscenities the pages in which he waged his dis- 
ingenuous warfare against the one great purifymg influence of 
human society. It may also have been a retributive justice 
which has left the glory of Charlemagne to be overshadowed 
by the foul and unmerited reproach on which Gribbon dweUa 
with such offensive levity ; for the monarch was habitually re-, 
gardless of that law, at once so strict and so benignant, which 
has rendered chastity the very bond of domestic love, and hap-. 
piness, and peace. In bursting through the restraints of virtue, 
Charlemagne was probably the willing victim of a transparent 
sophistry. From a nature so singularly constituted as his, 
sweet waters or bitter might flow with equal promptitude. 
That peculiarity of temperament in which his virtues and his 
vices found their common root, probably confounded the dis- 
tinctions of good and evil in his self-judgments, and induced 
him to think lightly of the excesses of a disposition so often 
conducting him to the most noble and magnanimous enter- 
prises. For such was the revelry of his animal life, so inex-^ 
haustible his nervous energies, so intense the vibrations of each 
successive impulse along the chords of his sensitive nature, so 
insatiable his thirst for activity, and so uncontrollable his impa- 
tience of repose, that, whether he was engaged in a frolic or a 
chase — composed verses or listened to homilies — fought or ne- 
gotiated — cast down thrones or built them up — studied, con- 
versed, or legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone, were the 
one wakeful and really living agent in the midst of an inert, 
visionary, and somnolent generation. 

The rank held by Charlemagne among great commanders 
was achieved far more by this strange and almost superhuman 
activity than by any pre-eminent proficiency in the art or sci- 
ence of war. He was seldom engaged in any general action,' 
and never undertook any considerable siege, excepting that of 
Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than a protracted block- 
ade. But, during forty-six years of almost unintermitted war- 
/ fare, he swept over the whole surface of Europe, from the Ebro 



CHARLEMAGNE. 67 

to the Oder, from Bretagne to Hungary, from DenmarK to Cap- 
ua, with, such a velocity of movement and such a decision of 
purpose, that no power, civilized or barbarous, ever provoked 
his resentment without rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and 
irresistible blows. And though it be true, as Gibbon has ob- 
served, that he seldom, if ever, encountered in the field a re- 
ally formidable antagonist, it is not less true that, but for his 
military skill, animated by his sleepless energy, the countless 
assailants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have 
become too formidable for resistance. For to Charlemagne is 
due the introduction into modern warfare of the art by which 
a general compensates for the numerical inferiority of liis own' 
forces to that of his antagonists^the art of moving detached ■ 
bodies of men along remote but converging lines with such 
mutual concert as to throw their united forces at the same 
moment on any meditated point of attack. Neither the Alpine 
marches of Hannibal nor those of Napoleon were combined with 
greater foresight, or executed with greater precision, than the 
simultaneous passages of Charlemagne and Count Bernard 
across the same mountain ranges, and their ultimate union in ' 
the vicinity of their Lombard enemies. 

But though many generals have eclipsed the fame of Char- 
lemagne as a strategist, no one ever rivaled his inflexible per- 
severance as a conqueror. The Carlovingian crown may m- 
deed be said to have been worn on the tenure of continual con- 
quests. It was on that condition alone that the family of Pe- 
pin of Heristal could vindicate the deposition of the Merovings 
and the pre-eminence of the Austrasian people ; and each mem- 
ber of that family, in his turn, gave an example of obedience 
to that law, or tradition, of their house. But by none of them 
was it so well observed as by Charlemagne himself. From his 
first expedition to his last there intervened forty-six years, no 
one of which he passed in perfect peace, nor without some mil- 
itary triumph. In six months he reduced into obedience the 
great province or kingdom of Aquitaine. In less than two 
years he drove the Lombard king into a monastic exile, placing 
on his own brows the iron crown, and with it the sovereignty 
over nearly all the Italian peninsula. During tliirty-three suc- 
cessive summers he invaded the great Saxon confederacy, un- 
til the deluge of barbarism with which they threatened South- 



68 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

era. Europe was effectually and forever repressed. It has "been 
alleged, indeed, that the Saxon wars were waged in the spirit 
of fanaticism, and that the vicar of Christ placed the sword of 
Mohammed in the hands of the sovereign of the Franks. It 
is, I think, an unfounded charge, though sanctioned by (xih- 
bon and by Warburton; and by names of perhaps even greater 
authority than theirs. That the alternative, "believe or die," 
was sometimes proposed by Charlemagne to the Saxons, I shall 
not, indeed, dispute. But it is not less true that, before these 
terms were tendered to them, they had again and again reject- 
ed his less formidable proposal, " be quiet and live." In form 
and in terms, indeed, their election lay between the G-ospel 
and the sword. In substance and in reality, they had to make 
their choice between submission and destruction. A long and 
deplorable experience had already shown that the Frankish peo- 
ple had neither peace nor security to expect for a single year, 
so long as their Saxon neighbors retained their heathen rites, 
and the ferocious barbarism inseparable from them. Fearful 
as may be the dilemma, " submit or perish," it is that to which 
every nation, even in our own times, endeavors to reduce a host 
of invading and desolating foes ; nor, if we ourselves were now 
exposed to similar inroads, should we offer to our assailants con- 
ditions more gentle or less peremptory. 

He must be a resolute student of history who, on investi- 
gating the progress of the conquests of Charlemagne, is neither 
deterred nor discouraged by the incoherence of the narrative, 
the complexity of the details, or the difficulties, both of geog- 
raphy and chronology, which beset his way. The labyrinth 
can, indeed, be rightly understood only by those who have pa- 
tiently trodden it ; yet some clew to the apparently inextrica- 
ble maze may be found in a brief review of the causes which 
were constantly working out the success of the conqueror. 

First. Not only each of his wars, but each of his campaigns, 
was a national act. At Easter in every year he held a great 
council of war, at which all the Austrasian, and many of the 
Neustrian bishops, counts, viscounts, barons, and leudes attend- 
ed. They followed their king into the field with confidence and 
enthusiasm, because it was always in prosecution of an enter- 
prise which, though suggested by his foresight, had been adopt- 
ed with their consent, and sanctioned by their acclamations. 



CHARLEMAGNE. 69 

Secondly, In all his wars, Graul afforded to Charles an in- 
vulnerable basis for his military operations. From Gaul he 
invaded every part of Europe, leaving beliind him both an ex- 
haustless magazine of men and arms, and, in case of disaster, 
a secure and accessible retreat. 

Thu'dly. Availing himself of the knowledge of his G-allic 
and Lombard subjects, Charlemagne ' had effected great im- 
provements in the mere material of war. His Franks were 
no longer a bare-legged and bare-headed horde, armed with 
the old barbaric lance and short sword, or defended by a 
round, wicker-worked shield, fenced by skins. They now bore 
the long Roman buckler and a visored helmet, and were armed 
with the pilum, with a long-pointed, two-handed sword, and 
with that heavy club shod with iron knots, which, if we be- 
heve the romance of Turpin, was in special favor among cleri- 
cal combatants, because it enabled them to slay their enemies 
without contracting the guilt of shedding blood. The Paladins, 
celebrated by the same warlilte prelate, divided, as we know, 
with their steeds the glory of their acliievements, the two be- 
ing reputed to be almost as inseparable as in the Centaur ; a 
legend which had its basis in Charlemagne's habit of mounting 
his cavahy on horses of prodigious power, bred in the pastures 
of the Lower Rhine. 

Fourtlily. If not a master of the art of war, he was far re- 
moved in this respect from the barbaric chiefs who first led the 
Salian and Ripuarian hordes into Graul. With Rome and Ro- 
man examples ever before his eyes, he knew, as I have indeed 
aheady observed, how to move his armies in separate corps, at 
once detached and connected ; and with unerring geographical 
knowledge was able always to direct his blows at the vulnerable 
points of the various countries which he successively invaded. 

Fifthly. Imitating the policy of Caesar, and anticipating 
that of Napoleon, Charlemagne made war support itself. Nei- 
ther in his capitularies, nor in the chronicles of his reign, is 
there any proof or suggestion that his troops ever received or 
expected any pay or military allowances. War was at once 
their duty, their passion, and their emolument. In that age 
every proprietor of land, allodial or beneficial, equipped, armed, 
and mounted his own followers ; and companies, regiments, or 
battalions were but so many gatherings on the field of those 



70 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

who were accustomed to live in the immediate vicinity of each 
other as leudes, as free husbandmen, or as coloni. 

Sixthly. Charlemagne horrowed from Rome, and transmit- 
ted to the modern Emperor of the French, the example of mak- 
ing each new conquest the hasis for a farther acquisition. He 
constrained the vanquished Lombards to march under his 
standard against the Saxons and the Bavarians, and to assist 
at the sieges of Barcelona and Pampeluna. In every nation 
which he subdued, he found or made recruits for the subjuga- 
tion of some yet unconquered people ; and taught more than 
half the European v/orld to exult in the successes of a mon- 
arch who had first triumphed over themselves. 

Seventhly. In his campaigns in Spain, in Lombardy, and 
in Aquitaine, Charlemagne may be said to have contended 
with the superstratum of society, and to have availed himself 
of the alliance of the substratum. The old Iberian, G-othic, 
and Italian populations regarded him as the antagonist of the 
dominant Saracens in the one peninsula, and of dominant 
Lombards in the other. To divide and conquer was, indeed^ 
his unfailing maxim in whatever country he invaded, as often 
as he found the inhabitants of it already separated from each 
other by religion, language, or traditions ; by public, social, or 
domestic customs ; in short, by any of the distinctions which 
promote and exasperate international animosities. In this re- 
spect, Charlemagne at Barcelona or Pavia was the exact pro- 
totype of Napoleon at Milan or at Warsaw. 

Eighthly. Charlemagne is among the most memorable ex- 
amples of the union in the same mind of the most absolute 
reliance on its own powers, and of the most generous confi- 
dence in the powers of his subordinate officers. Such was the 
continuity and the promptitude of his own military movements, 
that, in studying them, one is tempted to assign to the rail- 
road an existence a thousand years earlier than the birth of 
Grcorge Stephenson. So important were the commands which 
he intrusted to his lieutenants, that, on reviewing them, one 
i^ tempted to imagine that the great conqueror himself was 
accustomed to luxuriate in the repose and enjoyments of his 
palace at Aix-la-Chapelle. It is difficult to say which of the 
two suppositions would be the more erroneous. 

Finally. The establishment of the vast empire over which 



CHARLEMAGNE. ' 71 

Charlemagne reigned during almost half a century is to he as- 
crihed chiefly, and heyond all other causes, to the character he 
sustained as the ally and champion of the Church. I will not 
now anticipate the subject of a future lecture, hut, waiving 
for the present all higher and all more recondite considera- 
tions, I limit myself to the remark that, in an age in which 
all the other elements of human society were in discord, the 
Church, and the Church alone, maintained a unity of opinion, 
of sentiment, of habits, and of authority. On that unity, the 
great basis of her own spiritual dominion, the Church enabled ' 
Charlemagne to erect the edifice of his temporal power ; while 
he, in turn, employed that power in the defense of her rights 
and in the extension of her authority. Disastrous as that al- 
liance may have been to some of his successors in the Grerman 
empire, it was to himself the main pillar and buttress of his 
state ; as it might have remained to future ages, if the heirs 
of his crown had also been the heirs of his wisdom. 

The marvelous series of events of which I thus recapitulate 
the main causes, may be studied in the Annals of Eginhard 
and in his Life of Charlemagne, in the Clironicle of St. Denys, 
and in the Saxon poet published by the Benedictines ; or, if 
that labor be too repulsive, they may be read (though not with 
equal interest) in the history of our own countryman and con- 
temporary, Mr. James. But, to be seen m all the vivid color- 
ing in which former ages contemplated them, they must be 
surveyed in the works of a much more amusing, though far 
less authentic series of writers — in the romance of Lancelot, 
in the G-esta of William the Short-nosed, in the legend called 
Philomela, in Turpin's Chi'onicle, in Pulci, in Boyardo, and, 
above all, in the Orlando Furioso, where genius, in the exer- 
cise of her legitimate despotism, has inverted the whole cur- 
rent of history, changing Charles, the Grlorious and the Wise, 
into an enchanted knight, surrounded by his paladins, and ele- 
vating to the seventh heaven of chivalry his kinsman Rolando, 
of whom history knows only that he fell before the treacherous 
Gascons at the pass of Roncesvalles. Yet Poetry, amid all her 
wildest fictions, has in these legends perpetuated the record 
of one great and memorable truth — the truth, I mean, that the 
contemporaries of the great conqueror and their descendants, 
to remote generations, cherished the traditions of his mighty 



72 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

deeds with enthusiastic delight, and lavished on his memory 
every tribute which either history could pay or imagination 
offer. 

And yet they who lived in his own age appear to have been 
impressed by the grandeur of his foreign and domestic policy 
even yet more than by the magnitude of his warlike achieve- 
ments. The sources of this illusion (for such I conceive it to 
have been) may be discovered with no great difficulty. At 
that period the imagmation of mankind was in bondage to the 
three venerable or splendid thrones which represented the Pa- 
pal, the Imperial, and the Mohammedan dynasties. The suc- 
cessors of Peter, of Csesar, and of Mohammed divided between 
them the homage of the world ; and Charlemagne aspired to 
wear the united diadems of Rome and Constantinople, to gov- 
ern the papacy, and to obtain the alliance and support of the 
Califate. He thus sought to combine, in his own person, all 
the titles to all the reverence which the men of his generation 
yielded to power, whether royal or sacerdotal ; and though the 
enterprise was not really successful, the magnitude and au- 
dacity of the attempt was not unrewarded by a large share of 
the admiration for which he thirsted. 

Pope Stephen I. had crowned and anointed Pepin-le-Bref. 
The second pope of that name was indebted to the son of Pepin 
for his personal safety, and for the extension of the papal do- 
minions. Adrian, who sat in the apostolic chair during twen- 
ty-two years, received from Charlemagne a renewal and an ex- 
tension of the same benefits, and manifested his gratitude by 
placing the Lombard crown on the brows of his benefactor. 
Thenceforward the Prankish king and the successor of St. Peter 
lived together rather as personal friends than as political allies. 
Charles became the protector of Adrian against all his enem.ies, 
whether Grreek, or Saracen, or Italian. Adrian became the 
zealous guardian of the rights of Charles within the Italian 
peninsula. The letters of the pope to the king are such as in 
our days an embassador or a viceroy might address to the sov- 
ereign whom he represents in some distant state or province. 
At one time he congratulates the conqueror on his victories ; 
at another, he transmits to him martyrs' bones and consecrated 
banners, or invokes his aid against the invaders of the papal 
territory, or solicits his personal presence at Rome, or entreats 



CHARLEMAGNE. 73 

tliat delegates may "be sent to represent liim there, or asks an 
augmentation of the ecclesiastical territories, or requests that 
materials may he sent to him for reconstructing the Cathedral 
of St. Peter ; hut, whatever may he the occasion, the language 
of the pontiff is still that either of a suhject addressing his 
prince, or of a patriarch accosting a much-loved disciple and 
much-honored friend. That the attachment v^as smcere and 
mutual, it would he a gratuitous skepticism to douht. Though 
he could not write his own language, Charles could dictate 
Latin verse ; and, on the death of Adrian, he composed for him 
an epitaph, which was engraven in letters of gold on his tomh, 
and long attested the rememhrance and the regrets of his sur- 
viving associate. For the following extract from this imperial 
elegy, I am responsihle only so far as relates to the accuracy 
of the quotation. 

Post patrem lacrymans, Carolus htec carmina scrips! ; 
Tu milii dulcis amor, te modo plango pater. 
Nomina jungo simul, titulis clai'issima, nostra 
Adrianus, Carolus ; rex ego, tuque pater. 

Leo, the successor of Adrian, was exposed to the ill will and 
the persecution of the Roman populace, and he therefore riv- 
eted yet more strongly the honds which united the papal and 
the Frankish powers. Crossing the Alps, he sought and obtain- 
ed the protection of Charlemagne against the turbulence of the 
city ; and requited his protector by hailing him with the titles 
of Csesar, and Imperator semper Augustus — ^titles so long un- 
heard, but so indelibly engraven on the memory and the im- 
agination of mankind. 

Nor was this the unforeseen result of any sudden impulse. 
The elevation of the Frankish king to the imperial dignity 
must have been preconcerted with Leo during his residence in 
Germany, if not with Adrian, at an earlier period. M. Gruizot, 
indeed, regards it as the step at which Charlemagne first de- 
viated from a patriotic into a selfish policy, and, therefore, as 
the step from which commenced the decline of the Carlovin- 
gian power. The apologist of the monarch might answer, and 
perhaps justly answer, that though conquest was the inevi- 
table basis of the Austrasian throne, it is a basis on which no 
throne can be long securely rested ; that it therefore behooved 
Charles to sustain his material power by those moral powers 



74 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OP 

which are the indispensable condition of all enduring dominion ; 
that the moral powers within his restch were imagination and 
reverence — imagination to he enthralled by the reviving image 
of the CsBsars, reverence to he conciliated by the combination 
of whatever was most illustrious in secular history with what- 
ever was most sacred in ecclesiastical traditions ; that the un- 
ion which he formed between the Church and the State seem- 
ed, therefore, to promise to the crown the support of the holi- 
est sanctions, and to the tiara the aid of the firmest political 
power ; that, so long as that union endured, this promise was 
actually fulfilled ; that when it was at length dissolved, both 
the Church and the State were plunged into an anarchy, which, 
at the end of more than -a hundred years, issued in the Feudal 
and the Papal despotisms ; and that, however much the hopes 
with which the empire was revived were frustrated, it was on 
that revival alone that any foundation of hope could, in that 
age, have been discovered by the most penetrating foresight, 
animated by the most ardent philanthropy. 

The apologist of Leo and of Charles, if he be discreet, will 
not, however, deny that hope sometimes elevated them into 
that visionary world, into which perhaps all of us too often 
seek to escape from the tame possibilities of our actual exist- 
ence. "We may, indeed, receive with some distrust the story 
of the intended marriage of the "Western emperor and of Irene, 
the empress of the East — a marriage by which all the domin- 
ions of Constantine and all the fold of St. Peter were to be once 
more united under their respective heads, secular and eccle- 
siastical. But it can hardly be doubted that such a restoration 
of the imperial and of the papal dynasties to their original ex- 
tent of authority was the subject of solemn and even of serious 
debate between the Roman, the G-erman, and the Byzantine 
courts ; and that the betrothment of Constantine Porphyro- 
genitus, the son of Irene, to Bertha, the daughter of Charles, 
was intended to lay the foundation of it. 

The embassy on this subject, which was dispatched to Aix- 
la-Chapelle by Nicephorus, who deposed and succeeded Irene, 
has supplied the Monk of St. Grail with some of the amusing 
incidents which it is his delight to describe, and which would 
"be ill exchanged for much of the information with which graver 
historians so often instruct and fatigue then- readers. Envoys 



CHARLEMAGNE. 75 

from tlie Frankish monarch had, it seems, received a cold and 
discourteous entertainment from Nicephorus at Constantino- 
ple. Charles, therefore (if we may believe the garrulous monk), 
avenged his injured dignity by providing the Grreek embassa- 
dors with guides through the Alps, who were directed to con- 
duct them along the wildest passes and the most tedious routes. 
The G-reeks, accordingly, reached G-ermariy with their persons, 
dress, and equipage in the sorriest plight imaginable. On their 
arrival, Charles is said to have had them introduced to four of 
his chief officers in succession, each arrayed in such splendid 
apparel, and attended by so large a retinue, as to induce the 
bewildered envoys to render four times over to his servants a 
homage which they could not pay, except to his own imperial 
person, without a great loss of dignity ; until at length (so 
runs the chronicle) they stood in the presence " of the most il- 
lustrioiis of kings, resplendent as the rising sun, glittering 
with gold and jewels, and leaning on the arm of the very man 
whom their master had presumed to treat with disrespect." 

It happened to be the festival of the Chcumcisiori ; and the 
Grreeks had brought with them (says the monk), as a present, 
a musical instrument which, by means of brazen tubes and 
bellows of ox hides, produced sounds alternately as solemn as 
the thunder and as gentle as the lyre. Singing in their own 
language the psalms appropriated to that holy season, they 
were overheard by Charles, who, enraptured by the sacred 
harmonies, commanded his chaplains to eat no bread till they 
had laid before him a Latin version of those beautiful anthems. 
He had mortified the effeminacy and retaliated the rudeness 
of his G-reek allies, but he enthusiastically felt and acknowl- 
edged the charms of their superior civilization. Nor was their 
embassy ineffectual. The dreams of reuniting the East and 
the West had indeed fled with the deposition of Irene ; but 
her successor formally acknowledged the Austrasian monarch 
not merely as Rex, or Basileus, but as Imperator also ; and 
concurred with him in tracing the line which separated their 
respective empires in Italy, on the banks of the Danube, and 
on the shores of the Adriatic. 

A sovereign of far wider renown than Nicephorus, even Ha- 
roun al Rasohid, the hero of so many of tlie thousand and one 
nights, had, during his war with the Byzantme empire, sought 



76 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

the alliance of the Franks, who were then in arms against the 
same power. The Monk of St. Grail is again the entertaining 
historian of the embassy which explored the almost unknown 
world interposed between the calif in Persia and the emperor 
at Aix-la-Chapelle. The reception of his Mussulman guests, 
the banquet, and the chase provided for their amusement, 
their hyperbolical raptures and compliments, and the amenity 
with which Charles received the indiscreet freedoms into which 
good cheer betrayed them, are all delineated with the hand of 
a painter. From less amusing authors we learn that the calif 
bound himself to succor all Christian pilgrims resorting to the 
Holy Sepulchre, and to protect all Frank ish merchants in the 
prosecution of their affairs in Syria. The alliance between 
Charlemagne and the commander of the Faithful was, indeed, 
opposed by no very serious impediments. Their empires were 
nowhere conterminous ; nor, except on the ground of their 
religious differences, had those sovereigns any motive for mu- 
tual hostility. And, even in that remote and superstitious 
age, sympathy of character and a palpable identity of interests 
were of more power to unite the rulers of the world than con- 
flicting creeds were of power to alienate them from each other. 
To the sentiment of mutual admiration, Charles and Haroun 
added the knowledge that, to curb the Greeks in the East, 
and to weaken the Saracens in the West of Europe, were the 
common objects of the policy of each ; and on that basis they 
entered into friendly relations, which, cemented by an occa- 
sional interchange of diplomatic courtesies, and disturbed by 
no jealousies on either side, continued in force until both the 
Arabian and the Frankish sceptres had passed into other hands 
than theirs. 

Of that inevitable change, as indeed of the other limits 
which must circumscribe all human greatness, Charlemagne 
seems to have been habitually forgetful. It was not enough 
to have established peace in his hereditary states — to have in- 
vented a new art or system of war — to have acquired an em- 
pire as extensive as that of Honorius — to have triumphed in 
sixty campaigns over all its enemies — to have formed alliances 
extending throughout the whole civilized world — and to have 
made the Catholic Church herself his tributary. He must 
enter into a conflict with the nature of man himself, concen- 



CHARLEMAGNE. 77 

tratiiig all power in his own person, and ruling all the prov- 
inces of his vast dominion in the spirit of an indiscriminating 
and inflexihle uniformity. The same impatience of the tardy- 
growth of national institutions, the same desire to produce at 
once magnificent and harmonious results, and the same pride 
of conscious superiority which animated Charlemagne, has 
taken possession of almost each in turn of the great founders 
of the dynasties of our world. In each of them it has heen 
ineffectual. The passion to concentrate and to assimilate has 
ever been opposed by the same insuperable obstacles ; and the 
mightiest human authority has at last been compelled to obey 
that public will, of which itself is, in reality, but the creature 
and the agent. 

Thus Charlemagne was an Austrasian, and consequently 
could not extricate himself from the bonds by which the tra- 
ditionary maxims of G-ermany restrained the powers of the 
German monarch. They regarded him as a Kyning, not as an 
Autocrat ; and, therefore, he could not enact laws for their 
government without the concurrence of the national assembly. 
Even with then' concurrence it was not really in his power to 
legislate in any other than the Teutonic spirit. It was under 
the coercion of these fetters, and of many others such as these, 
that Charlemagne promulgated his vast collection of Capitu- 
laries ; the imperishable monument of his stupendous activity, 
and the yet living picture of society, whether ecclesiastical, 
political, military, civil, or moral, of the age which gave them 
birth. M. G-uizot has analyzed the contents, and explained the 
structure and principles of this code with such a compass of 
learning, and with such an affluence and profundity of thought, 
as might seem to render any farther elucidation of it super- 
fluous, if not impossible. I shall venture, hoAvever, to touch 
on some of those more important details, for which no proper 
place could have been found in a survey made from the com- 
manding heights of political philosophy on which that gi-eat 
writer is accustomed to take his stand, and from whence the 
lower world is contemplated in a light which occasionally loses 
in distinctness what it gains in breadth and brilliancy. 

In a celebrated passage from Hincmar, which is transcribed 
at length by M. G-uizot, and referred to by all the other author- 
ities, we have the authentic record of the constitution and of 



78 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

the habitual proceedings of the Legislature of the Franks. It 
describes the gatherings of the bishops, dukes, counts, vis- 
counts, and leudes at each autumn to consider, and at each 
spring time to adopt, such measures as the exigencies of the 
, state required. From the same source we learn that, though 
Charles himself seldom assisted in person at these delibera- 
tions, he possessed and exercised at them all the real initiative, 
and that these synods, courts, parliaments, or councils of war 
(for they were each in turn) had thus much in common with 
the parliaments held in far distant times in Paris^ that, like 
them, they met rather to accept and record the decisions of the 
sovereign, than to anticipate or suggest measures of their own. 
All the French commentators on the history of their own 
country are amazed at the incoherence of the Carlo vingian 
capitularies, where enactments on every imaginable subject 
follow each other in a succession so arbitrary, that it might 
seem to have been suggested by caprice, or dictated by chance. 
He, however, who is conversant with the early volumes of our 
own statutes at large, is familiar with a similar phenomenon, 
and with the cause of it. In the times of our Plantagenets, 
all the petitions of Parliament to the sovereign were presented 
to him at the end of each session in then- chronological order ; 
and, when his assent was obtained, they became collectively 
what was, and is still, regarded as a single statute. Now, 
suppose the same course to have been followed with the three 
or four hundred acts of Parliament of the year 1849, and far- 
ther suppose them to have been published without the typo- 
graphical aid of chapters, numerals, titles, sections, marginal 
abbreviations, and so on ; and then the statute 11 and 12 Vic- 
toria would rival in incongruity and incoherence any of the 
statutes of Edward I., or any of the capitularies of Charle- 
magne. 

The Legislature of England, however, was not accustomed 
to confound the pro\T!nce of the law-giver with that of the mor- 
alist in the same manner, or to the same extent, as those clerks 
in holy, orders who drew up the enactments of the Champs de 
Mai, and who took the opportunity of infusing into them va- 
rious maxims of virtue, and no less frequent exhortation to the 
practice of it. Yet some trace of a similar habit still lingers 
/ in the dogmatic preambles wliich so often introduce our acts 



CHARLEMAGNE. 79 

of Parliament ; and the Frankisli custom liad at least the ad- 
vantage of keeping alive the remembrance of the union which 
ought to he indissoluble between the eternal principles of mo- 
rality and the fluctuating exigencies of positive law. 

To reduce the Carlovingian code to any digested form, like 
that of Justinian or Theodosius, is abandoned as a hopeless 
task by all commentators, and especially by M. Cluizot, who, 
of all of them, has most strenuously wrestled with the diffi- 
culty. For our immediate purpose it will be enough to say, 
that all the more important of the capitularies of Charlemagne 
may be classed under the five heads of ecclesiastical, military, 
penal, administrative, or organic laws ; and that, under each 
of those heads, they exliibit the same propensity to centralize 
and assimilate — a propensity e^ev active, but ever kept in 
check by the combined powers of public opinion and of na- 
tional customs. 

First. The capitularies of 769 and of 779 are wholly or 
chiefly composed of ecclesiastical canons ; and the assemblies 
by which they were enacted are accordingly enumerated by 
the Benedictines among the councils of the Grallican Church. 
Yet these laws purport to be promulgated by " Carolus, Dei 
gratia rex regnique Francorum rector, et devotus Sanctse Ec- 
clesiee defensor ; atque adjutor (in omnibus) Apostolicse Sedis." 
He is, indeed, represented as acting on the advice of the coun- 
cil of the bishops and the other clergy, but also as acting on 
the advice of his "fideles" also. To be legislator for the 
Church as well as for the State was essential to the unity and 
universality of his power ; and, as the papal monarchy was 
still only m embryo, the Church would seem to have acquies- 
ced, or, rather, to have rejoiced in the usurpation. 

Secondly. In the capitularies of the year 807 occur the 
most memorable of the military laws of Charlemagne. They 
requned every owner of a benefice to march against the enemy ; 
they enjoined the attendance on the army of every man pos- 
sessed of not less than three mansi ; but of two men, each 
possessing only two mansi, or of three men, each possessing a 
single mansus, one only was to serve. The counts were re- 
quired to present themselves at the Champs de Mai, with their 
vassals and their chariots. Each defaulter was to pay a fine 
or escuage of sixty sous. If the offender held any dignity or 



80 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 

office under the crown, a fast of a certain number of days was 
to be the penalty of his absence or delay ; and, finally, each 
soldier was to provide himself with rations, arms, and clothing 
for three months. From these enactments, it appears therefore, 
first, that the conscription was not a novelty of the age of Car- 
not and Napoleon ; and, secondly, that military service did 
not become the condition of the tenure of lands, for the first 
time, under the feudal system ; and, lastly, that the same vig- 
orous arm which held in subjection the depositaries of religious 
and moral power, was able to control, with at least equal en- 
ergy, the physical or material forces of the empire. 

Thirdly. But when Charlemagne would regulate the state 
of his people in relation to their property, and their obligations 
to himself or to each other, the spirit of centralization and 
uniformity was opposed by an antagonistic spirit, with which 
not even he could successfully contend. Each of the nations 
over whom he ruled possessed its own code, and each of his 
subjects could, at his pleasure, transfer his allegiance from one 
to another of those systems of national law. The invasion of 
this privilege would have been made at the imminent haz- 
ard, or rather at the certain sacrifice, of the dominion of the 
innovator. In the penal capitularies of 803 may therefore 
be traced at once the endeavor to amend the Frankish, Gral- 
lic, Lombard, and Saxon laws, and the impediments which 
rendered that attempt ineffectual. Though aided by all the 
knowledge, religious and secular, of his learned associates, 
Charlemagne was constrained to legislate for his people in the 
spirit of his Salian and Ripuarian ancestors ; not superseding 
their codes, but completing them ; leaving the law personal, not 
local ; and adhering to the barbarous system of regarding 
crime, not as a wrong to society at large, but as an injury to 
the individual sufferer ; not as an offense to be punished by 
the state, but as a damage to be compensated by pecuniary 
composition. 

Fourthly. In his administrative capitularies, Charles com- 
bined the imperial spirit, which acknowledges no division of 
authority, and tolerates no departure from a prescribed model, 
with the barbaric spirit which governs an empire and a private 
household with the same microscopic vision. Gribbon has de- 
rided the Carlovingian legislation about the royal eggs and 



CHARLEMAGNE. 81 

poultry. Nor is it possible to deny, or easy to exaggerate, the 
whimsical contrast which the great capitulary de Villis, of the 
year 800, presents to the usual style of the edicts of sovereign 
princes. Yet the critic ought not to have concealed that this 
capitulary was a great fiscal law, regulating, in the most 
minute details, the management of the estates from which the 
charges of government were principally defrayed, and the 
splendor of royalty was chiefly supported. A barbaric splen- 
dor, it is true ; a splendor like that of some Homeric chief pre- 
siding at a table wliich a whole battalion of cooks had supplied 
for a host of voracious guests, as indomitable at the board as 
in the field. But no document of that age exhibits with equal 
clearness either the habits of social life, or the exactness of 
the care with which Charlemagne surveyed the whole com- 
pass of his administration, domestic as well as public ; or 
the solicitude with which he labored to reduce to one uni- 
form system the most insignificant, as well as the most im- 
portant, of the functions which he confided to his subordinate 
officers. 

Fifthly. Two years later, that is, in the year 802, he pro- 
mulgated the most reimarkable of all his capitularies. It is 
that which regulates the functions of the officers called missi 
dominii, and which, therefore, belongs to that class of laws 
which I have distinguished as organic. The duty, or rather 
the prescribed duty, of the missi dominii was to traverse every 
province of the empire, to represent the person and to wield 
the delegated authority of the emperor, to redress all griev- 
ances, and to punish all offenders in his name, and annually 
to report to him what were the wants and what the condition 
of every class of his people. They were to be the organs and the 
ministers of a great central power, of which the sovereign 
himself was to be the one superintendent. They were to in- 
fuse unity of spirit and of system into the disjointed members 
of an empire of vast extent, peopled by nations in every grada- 
tion, from the barbarism of Saxony to the comparative civili- 
zation of Southern Italy. No interest was so extensive, none 
so minute, as to lie beyond the range of their inquiry and in- 
tervention. The law itself, and the instructions issued in 
pursuance of it, remain as a monument of unrivaled vigilance, 
circumspection, and jealousy, and indicate a strange impa- 

F 



82 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE, ETC. 

tienoe of the narrow limits of the human understanding, and 
an insatiable thirst for powers more than human. 

It is only when regarded in this light that this celebrated 
law appears to me to merit its celebrity. I am aware of no 
proof that it was ever reduced into practice, except in a very 
few particular cases ; nor do I perceive any reason for believ- 
ing that it was even really practicable. It presupposes a fa- 
cility of internal communication and intercourse between dif- 
ferent parts of the empire — an organization of the various 
departments of the government — a distribution of forces civil 
or military — an habitual obedience to ,the royal or- imperial 
authority — and a central establishment for the revision of the 
reports of the commissioners, and for giving effect to their ad- 
vice, such as scarcely exists at the present moment in any of 
the great commonwealths of modern Europe. That such a 
law should have been really executed would have been little 
less than a miracle. That in the days of Charlemagne there 
should have been found counselors to devise, and a prince to 
promulgate, so complex and comprehensive a scheme of inter- 
nal administration, is, however, a fact of very deep interest, as 
exhibiting the progress which, even in that age, had been made 
by statesmen in the art destined to so strange a perfection in 
future ages — the art of Eutopian legislation. 

And wonderful, indeed, was the assemblage, and marvelous 
the intellectual culture of the great men to whom, without 
any injustice to Charlemagne, we may ascribe the conception 
as well as the compilation of those voluminous laws which 
bear his name. Eginhard, Hincmar, Alcuin, John Erigena, 
and many others, not unworthy to be associated with them, 
had, in fact, converted the court of Aix-la-Chapelle into an 
academy, the seat of many noble studies, and among them of 
the study of civil polity. Plato and Aristotle had hardly reached 
them except in the faint reflection of their Latin imitators. 
But those great scholars of the eighth and ninth centuries, like 
the great scholars of earlier and of later ages, delighted in ideal 
reconstructions of human society ; yet with this peculiarity, 
that they inscribed their day-dreams, not on fugitive leaves for 
the amusement of the studious, but in solemn enactments for 
the government of manlcind. They were, however, the grand 
conceptions of the noblest intellects which then occupied them- 



THE DECLINE AND FALL, ETC. 83 

selves atout human affairs. Their pohtioal philosophy may- 
have heen visionary ; hut in their own more appropriate sphere 
of diffusing literature, science, art, morals, and religion among 
their contemporaries, they received from Charlemagne such 
aids, and have conferred upon his reign and his memory such 
glories, as it has severely taxed the learning even of the Bene- 
dictines to illustrate. With tlieir aid, I hope on some future, 
though perhaps distant, occasion to bring under your notice an 
outline of those lahors. When we next meet, I propose, how- 
ever, to inquire into the causes which so rapidly subverted that 
splendid imperial edifice, of the foundation of wliich I have 
thus attempted to lay before you a rapid and most imperfect 
outline. 



LECTURE lY. 

ON THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 

In pursuance of the plan which I announced at the com- 
mencement of these lectures, I proceed to inquire. What were 
the causes of the transfer of the dominion of France from the 
Second Dynasty to the Third, from the lineage of Pepin to that 
of Hugues Capet ? 

The great aim and glory of the life of Charlemagne had been 
the revival of the empire of Rome in an intimate alliance with 
the Church of Rome. This was still the dominant idea of his 
mind at the approach and in the contemplation of his death. 
It was, indeed, an illusion to believe that the world was ripe 
for such a design. It was perhaps a still greater illusion to 
suppose that his own children were qualified to accomplish it. 
But it was a conviction worthy of his foresight, that his re- 
stored empire, at once Roman and Catholic, could be main- 
tained (if at all) only by making great sacrifices, and by in- 
curring still greater risks ; that dominions so vast and inco- 
herent could be governed (if at all) only by the intervention 
of viceroys, acting in his name and representing his person ; 
and that a trust so critical would be most safely reposed in 
those who were bound to him by the strongest ties of interest 
and of nature. In the undiminished vigor of his mental and 



84 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

"bodily health, Charlemagne therefore raised his three sons to 
the royal dignity ; committing the kingdom of Aquitaine to 
Louis, the kingdom of Grermany to Charles, and the kingdom 
of Italy to Pepin. The word "King," in that age, however, 
corresponded not so much with the same word in our modern 
use of it, as with the title of general or commander-in-cliief 
The three royal sons of Charlemagne acknowledged their sub- 
ordination to himself as their emperor, bowed to his commands 
as their father, and silently acquiesced in the rebukes which, 
in the one or the other capacity, he not seldom addressed to 
them. 

Having survived both Charles and Pepin, Charlemagne trans- 
ferred the Italian crown to Bernard, the son of Pepin, and as- 
sociated to himself, as his colleague in the empire, Louis, king 
of Aquitaine, better known in history by his title of Louis le 
Debonnaire. When, on the death of Charlemagne, Louis suc- 
ceeded to the undivided possession of the Carlovingian empire, 
Bernard, the son of his elder brother, took up arms in defense 
of his title (perhaps his superior title) to that splendid inher- 
itance, and perished in the attempt. 

Following the example of his father, Louis le Debonnaire 
made three successive partitions of the empire among his chil- 
dren. To Louis, known in history as Louis the G-ermanic, he 
assigned the kingdom of Bavaria ; to Pepin, the kingdom of 
Aquitaine ; and to Lothaire, first, the kingdoms of Italy and 
Graul, secondly, the whole of G-ermany (except Bavaria), and, 
thirdly, a participation in his own imperial crown and dignity. 
On the subsequent birth of Charles, his fourth son (afterward 
called Charles the Bald), by Judith, his second wife, Louis le 
Debonnaire created in his favor, and at the expense of Lothaire, 
a kingdom composed of Suabia, of Switzerland, and of the 
Grrisons, which was called " the kingdom of G-ermany." 

I do not affect to state these territorial divisions with pre- 
cise ■ accuracy ; nor with a view to my immediate purpose is 
such exactness necessary. It is enough to have explained the 
general nature of the measures by which Louis le Debonnaire 
attempted at once to retain to himself a supremacy over the 
whole empire, and to place each of the four great component 
members of it under the government of a distinct, though 
subordinate sovereign. The military and political history of 



THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 85 

France during the rest of liis reign records little else than the 
civil wars to which these partitions gave the occasion or the 
pretext. If we advert only to the motives of the belligerent 
princes, this protracted contest will appear a merely selfish 
struggle for power, originating in the jealousy with which the 
fortunes of Charles the Bald were regarded hy his brothers. 
If we advert to the motives which animated the Grallic, the 
Grerman, and the Italian nations to follow their standards, this 
long and sanguinary warfare will assume a higher and more 
enduring interest. 

During the reign of Charlemagne, the relations between 
G-aul and G-ermany had undergone a silent, but a total change. 
He was himself, in the fullest sense of the word, a G-erman. 
His habits, tastes, and pursuits, his favorite associates, his 
chosen residences, and his imperial policy, were all Teutonic. 
His house was indebted to G-erman warriors for its elevation. 
From the G-erman race he selected his chief officers, civil, 
military, and ecclesiastical. G-ermany was thus at once the 
hasis and the seat of his empire. 

During the same period, G-aul had descended from metro- 
politan to provincial rank. The G-allic people no longer con- 
stituted the military strength of theu' sovereign; they no 
longer exercised a predominant influence in his councils ; 
they ceased to receive the principal, or even an equal share, 
in the honors and emoluments at his disposal. The ancient 
conflicts between the Neustrian and the Austrasian kingdoms 
were falling rapidly into ohlivion. They were superseded by 
other, by more important, and more enduring rivalries. The 
Rhine now separated two nations who were united to each 
other only by their common subjection to the same cro\^Ti, 
but were disunited by conflicting interests, prejudices, and 
opinions. As if at once to indicate and to increase this dis- 
union, either people accepted or assumed new national desig- 
nations. Hitherto they had both borne the common name of 
Franks. To the inhabitants of G-aul, north of the Loire, it 
was a name which the traditions of three centuries had ren- 
dered venerable and attractive. They therefore gave to that 
territory the title of Francia, and to themselves the name of 
Franqois or Frenchmen. But the Franks on the right bank 
of the river regarded themselves only as one of those many 



86 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

nations comprised within tlie dominions of Charlemagne, 
which were collectively designated by the comprehensive and 
appropriate name of G-ermans. Louis le Debonnaire was not ' 
the emperor of the Franco-Grallic people, that is, of Franks 
and of G-auls united by national sympathies. He was the 
emperor of the French and of the G-ermans ; that is, of two 
populations alienated from each other by national antipathies. 

When, therefore, the three eldest of "the sons of Louis 
plunged into a series of civil wars with their father and with 
each other, to gratify their selfish ambition, they were able to 
rouse their subjects to arms by appealing to motives both 
more profound and more elevated than their own. The com- 
ponent members of the empire of Charlemagne had become 
impatient of the bonds which held them together. The French, 
the Italians, the Aquitanians, and the Burgundians, resented 
their subordination to a remote and foreign metropolitan pow- 
er, and saw in the banners of their youthful kings the stand- 
ards of their national independence. On the other hand^ 
Louis, the son and heir of Charlemagne, appeared to the G-er- 
manic people as the champion of G-erman ascendency; and 
that people gathered round him to maintain his dominion over 
provinces which they had so long considered as tributary to 
his crown, and as standing in a kind of inferior relation to 
their own father-land. 

The nations of Europe, therefore, drew the sword, not to 
promote the selfish purposes of their respective sovereigns, but 
to maintain a great general principle. No spectacle can be 
more revolting than the civil wars of Louis and his sons, if 
viewed in the light in which those princes regarded them. 
No conflict can be imagined in which the magnitude of the 
object better atoned for the fearful sacrifices by which it was 
accomplished, if viewed in the light in which the actual com- 
batants regarded them. The French and the Italians may 
be said to have composed two patriotic hosts, under the com- 
mand of two parricidal leaders. 

After rending asunder the dominions of Charlemagne into 
their three chief component parts, these centrifugal forces, 
still retaining their activity, though changing their direction, 
began to resolve each of those three divisions into the elements 
of which it was mainly composed. Thus, in the territories 



THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 87 

comprised within the limits of ancient G-aul, the Bretons, the 
Aquitanians, the Proven9aux, the Burgundians, and the peo- 
ple of Lorraine, each in turn extorted from Charles the Bald, 
or from his successors, the recognition of the royal character 
and authority of their respective kings or dukes. It was not, 
indeed, an authority which rejected all dependence on the 
King of France. In some indefinite sense he was still regard- 
ed as the superior and liege lord of such of those provincial 
monarchs as reigned within the limits of his kingdom. But 
his own proper and undisputed dominion lay within that re- 
gion of which the Meuse is the northern, and the Loire the 
southern houndary. There, surrounded by these new Grallic 
states, at once subordinate and hostile to him, at the same 
time his allies and his rivals, he ruled over the territory which 
was even then regarded as the seat and centre of the Grallic 
power, and which was destined to ascend through long ages of 
toil, of disaster, and of war, to an absolute supremacy over all 
the states among which Graul was for the present dismem- 
bered. 

I formerly observed, that the coincidence between the for- 
tunes of the two first French dynasties was too remarkable to 
have been fortuitous ; that, during the five centuries over 
which these phenomena extended, there must always have 
been at work some forces conducing to this reproduction of 
the same results — some effective agency, of which man him- 
self was at one time the unconscious, and another time even 
the unwilling, instrument — and I proposed to inquire what 
were those enduring springs of action, by the elastic force of 
which each of the Franco-Gallic monarchies arose with such 
similar energy, declined with such similar promptitude, fell 
into so similar a lifelessness, made way for so similar an aris- 
tocratic usurpation, and were so similarly productive of re- 
sults, the unexhausted influence of which we can yet perceive 
and feel after the lapse of so many years ? 

To this question, so far as it respects the Merovingian Dy. 
nasty, I answered by ascribing this agency and these springs 
of action to the barbarism of the Frankish monarchs and of 
their Frankish subjects ; or, in other words, to the energy, the 
rapacity, the ignorance, and the recklessness of the barbaric 
conquerors of G-aul. I may, however, seem to have been hith- 



88 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

erto engaged in tracing the decline and fall of the Carlovingi- 
an Dynasty to a cause the most remote from these. I have 
thus far ascribed that catastrophe to a long series of success- 
ful struggles for national independence. Now, it is no har- 
harous triumph to achieve deliverance from a foreign yoke hy 
force of arms, that so a solid basis may be laid for a domestic 
o-overnment. It is rather among the most sublime efforts of 
human daring, in the highest state of man's social advance- 
ment. Scotland, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, and Amer- 
ica, point with just exultation to those pages of their history 
which record their successful revolt against a metropolitan 
power. With what reason, then, can we stigmatize, by re- 
proachful or injurious terms, the corresponding passage in the 
history of the Franco-Grallic people ? If it was glorious for the 
nations of Europe to break the yoke of Napoleon, can it have 
been inglorious, or a proof of barbarism, for their remote an- 
cestors to have broken the yoke of the descendants of Charle- 
magne ? 

Such problems as these can never receive their correct solu- 
tion until they have been correctly stated. The question, as 
I have proposed it, assumes that they by whom the independ- 
ence of G-aul on the G-ermanic or Carlovingian empire was es- 
tablished were themselves really identical with the Grallic peo- 
ple. That assumption is, however, erroneous. Between those 
patriotic hosts and the mass of the population of G-aul there 
existed, throughout the whole of this protracted struggle, the 
broadest possible distinction. 

Man, in his barbarous state, is gregarious. He does not be- 
come social till he is civilized. He does not reach the highest 
attainment of all, which is the right use and enjoyment of sol- 
itude, until after the choicest culture of his moral and intel- 
lectual powers. Thus the G-erman invaders of G-aul were 
gregarious. They had dwelt together in their native forests 
rather as herds of men than as societies. When they settled 
themselves in the conquered country, and abandoned their mi- 
gratory life for sedentary pursuits, they found the exchange in 
the highest degree wearisome and oppressive. To have become 
solitary husbandmen, shepherds, or tillers of the ground, would 
have been to counteract all their natural propensities and ac- 
quired habits. They therefore formed themselves, not, indeed, 



THE CARLO VINGIAN DYNASTY. 89 

as before, into transient encampments, tut into the nearest 
practicable resemblance to them. Grathering round their chief, 
and holding the land in a kind of partnership with him, his 
leudes or companions divided their time between the excite- 
ments of the chase, the pleasures of a rude carousal, and the 
repose of protracted slumbers. The slaves, whom they either 
found or made, tended their flocks, and, under the charge of 
a manager or villicus, bestowed on their lands such rude hus- 
bandry as was then in use ; sometimes rendering a stipulated 
rent in kind, and at other times laying up the produce in store 
for their masters, after deducting only what was necessary for 
their own bare subsistence. 

Thus the rural society of Graul, after the Prankish conquest, 
came to be composed of three great classes, the lords, the vas- 
sals, and the slaves. How each of those classes was subdi- 
vided has been explained by M. G-uizot, in the fourth of his 
Essays on the History of France, in so luminous a method, 
and with such a prodigality of learning, as to leave his read- 
ers nothing to regret except that their teacher has permitted 
to them no scope for the unprompted exercise of their own 
powers of reflection. 

There were, however, in constant operation, causes tending 
to detach the second of these classes — that is, the free vassals — 
from their rural settlements. When brought within the influ- 
ence of the manners of imperial Rome, as still prevailing with- 
in the Romano-Grallic province, the Grerman Kyning, and each 
of his greater chieftains, sought to surround himself with a 
court resembling that of a praetorian prefect. To such a court 
the vassals in his vicinity thronged with eagerness. As the 
power of every great seigneur consisted in the wealth and num- 
ber of his dependents, he welcomed all who resorted to him in 
that character. And such retainers were never wanting at the 
residence of any such seigneur, for there alone were to be ob- 
tained the substantial benefits of grants of land and of civil 
and military offices, the imaginary benefits of titular distinc- 
tions, or the social benefits of more plentiful cheer, of louder 
revelry, of keener debate, and of a nobler chase than that of 
the sequestered village where the Grerman horde had fixed 
their Gallic settlements. 

If these innovations on the habits of Grerinany were sub- 



90 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

versive of the ancient Grerman equality of all free men, they 
tended still more strongly to the extinction of personal free- 
dom among the cultivators of the soil throughout the conquer- 
ed country. 

In the yet extant capitularies of Charlemagne may he found 
ample proofs of the social revolution which was thus produced 
by this aggregation of the free vassals at the courts of their 
lords or sovereign. That revolution consisted in their aban- 
donment not merely of rural life, hut of all interest in the cul- 
ture, and even in the ownership of the soil. Such pursuits 
were at all times unwelcome to the Grerman warriors, repug- 
nant to their national tastes, and hostile to their gregarious 
habits ; but they became absolutely intolerable when contrast- 
ed with the festivities, the excitement, and the indolence of the 
royal or seignorial courts, or with the yet keener delights of 
war, of which they shared the dangers and the triumphs with 
their king. They therefore ceased to consider their estates 
in G-aul as their homes, and learned to regard them only as so 
many remote sources of revenue. But to derive from such 
property any revenue for the maintenance of the absent own- 
er was no easy undertaking. It would be accomplished only 
by the use of servile and compulsory labor — a mode of hus- 
bandry at all times so unprofitable, that, by the operation of a 
general law of human society, a large proportion of all such 
lands and of the slaves attached to them were continually 
passing through a rapid succession of sales, forfeitures, and 
confiscations. They thus, at length, reverted to the crown, 
and were again included within the royal domain. 

Such is the only intelligible explanation of the extent and 
number of the grants of land which, as appears from his yet 
extant charters, were made by Charlemagne in every part of 
the (rallic territory. In such grants the "inhabitants' houses, 
slaves, movables and immovables," on the land, are said to 
be always expressly included. The learned Alcuin acquired 
by one of these concessions no less than 20,000 slaves from the 
bounty of his friend and sovereign ; and it is not probable that 
he fared so well in this respect as any one of the dukes or 
co"unts by whose aid the conquests of Charlemagne were ac- 
complished. Vast indeed, therefore, must have been the amount 
of the servile as compared with the free population of Gaul, 



THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 91 

The great Capitulary de Villis affords a still more impress- 
ive proof of tlie same fact. The royal farms, to the manage- 
ment of which that law relates, were obviously extended over 
a large proportion of the whole surface of the country. They 
have, indeed, been estimated at a fourth of the whole, and 
though this is probably an exaggeration, yet the error can 
hardly be very considerable, since it was from this source that 
Charlemagne defrayed the greater part of the civil and mili- 
tary expenses of his government during almost half a century. 
Now the Capitulary de Villis is framed on the assumption that 
this vast domain was to be cultivated by slaves, under the 
superintendence of managers, to be appointed for that purpose 
by the emperor himself, or by his officers. It follows that at 
that period the immense majority of the uihabitants of G-aul 
were of servile condition ; that is, that they were bound to 
render to their employers a life-long labor, enforced, not by the 
hope of reward, but by the fear of punishment, and regulated, 
not according to the laws of the divine providence (ever equi- 
table, though often mysterious), but according to the arbitrary 
will of man. 

When, therefore, we speak of the Grallic people as engaged 
in a patriotic struggle for national independence, we refer to 
the myriads of free vassals. When we speak of the G-allic 
people of the same era as barbarous, we refer to the millions 
of slaves ; or rather we refer, though not with equal emphasis, 
both to the one and the other ; because a divine law, as uni- 
versal as it is just, has decreed that, they who impose on their 
fellow-men the /yoke of slavery, shall themselves be partakers 
of the degradation which they inflict. 

The term "barbarism" is, indeed, vague and equivocal. I 
employ it as designating that condition of society in which 
government is not and can not be maintained by moral re- 
straints and mfluences, such as love, reverence, and policy, but 
is and can be maintained only by physical power on the side of 
the rulers, and by abject terror on the side of the people. The 
government of the Mansus bemg, in this sense of the word, 
barbaric under the Carlovingian princes, such also, by a nat- 
ural and inevitable consequence, became the government of 
the state. The degradation of the commonwealth kept pace 
with the degradation of the households of which it was com- 



92 THE DECLINE AND PALL OF 

posed. The Aristocratic oligarchy was the legitimate off- 
spring of the domestic oligarchy. 

To establish yet more clearly this pedigree of despotism, 
let it he borne in mind that the Frankish conquerors of Graul 
apportioned it among the chief warriors of theu* tribes on the 
tenure of military service, excluding fem.ales from the line of 
inheritance, that there might never be any diminution in the 
number of the military tenants. But the Salian law-givers 
took no security against the risk of such a diminution from 
the transfer of many such tenements to a single person. Ex- 
perience at length proved the reality of this danger, and show- 
ed that, by means of it, the number of free proprietors might 
become insufficient to recruit the armies and to supply the 
waste of war. Charles Martel, therefore, and his success- 
ors, invented what they thought an effectual remedy. They 
made numerous and extensive grants of land, on the condition 
that the grantee should always be liable to serve in his own 
person in the field, and that on his death the land should re- 
vert to the king. It was easy to make such a reservation, 
but the common feelings of mankind revolted against the en- 
forcement of it. The son was, therefore, in fact permitted, 
though he was not in strictness entitled, to retain the benefice 
which his father had inhabited, cultivated, or improved. 

These benefices thus became heritable ; and that result teem- 
ed with consequences far more important than that of intro- 
ducing a new tenure of so much property. To every such ben- 
efice were attached, as we have seen, great bodies of slaves, 
and over them the beneficiary exercised, not merely the rights 
of an owner, but also the authority of a magistrate. His mag- 
isterial or judicial power gradually but surely extended itself 
ffom the servUe to the free inhabitants of the Mansus. His 
jurisdiction came to embrace all persons, of whatever condi- 
tion, within that locality. The proprietor of the benefice was 
at the same time its domestic judge ; and when the estate it- 
self passed to the heir, he inherited with it the judgment-seat 
of his ancestor. 

When the minds of men had become familiarized with the 
anomaly of a son administering justice by mere descent from 
his father, it was easy to advance another step, and to include 
within the domestic patrimony jurisdictions which were not 



T K E C A R L O V I ^' G I A N DYNASTY. 93 

territorial. The magistracy of the count or viscount thus came 
to be regarded, not as a public trust, or as a mere personal em- 
ployment, but as a right or property transmissible to his male 
heirs. As early as the reign of Charles the Bald, a custom 
hardly distinguishable from law had taught the holder of ev- 
ery such office to consider it as the future inheritance of his 
descendants. 

At the Diet of Kiersey, in the year 877, Charles gave to that 
custom the sanction of a positive edict. It pledged the king 
himself, and his successors, to confer the jurisdiction, or, as it 
was called, the " honor" of the county, on the son of any de- 
ceased count ; and it bound every count to observe the same 
rule with regard to all persons holding any jurisdictions, terri- 
torial or personal, within their respective counties. * 

The impulse given by this edict to the growth of the Aristo- 
cratic Oligarchy was great and uresistible. The followers of 
Clovis had, indeed, brought from theu* native seat in Grerma- 
ny a strong predilection for that form of government ; and that 
tendency, though for the moment arrested by the strong hand 
of Charlemagne, had never been destroyed. The Frank settled 
in G-aul had retained, from generation to generation, much of 
the spirit of a clansman. He had, indeed, witnessed and un- 
dergone many and great political changes. His tribe, ceasmg 
to migrate, had become stationary. He had himself exchanged 
the character of a warrior for that of a vassal. His military 
leader had assumed the title and the authority of a count or 
seigneur. His patriarchal Kyning had become a monarch. 
His ancient confederacy had been converted into a kingdom. 
But m the midst of all these vicissitudes he had cherished the 
hereditary traditions of the forest, and had continued to ac- 
knowledge his ancestral dependence on his immediate chief- 
tain, and his ancestral subjection to a superior and ultimate 
sovereign. "When, therefore, the Edict of Kiersey gave a for- 
mal and legal existence to hereditary landships and jurisdic- 
tions in any part of France, it was supported rather than encoun- 
tered by the prejudices and prepossessions of the free Frankish 
inhabitants of the country. It was, indeed, the extension to 
them of a power which might be traced to a servile origin, and 
which had gi'own out of a servile relation ; but to the free vas- 
sal of that age, as to the lower rank of free men in all ages, 



94 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

the deprestion of the slaves, and the arbitrary rule under which 
they lived, were subjects, not of regret, but of exultation. In 
those bondmen, toiling for the maintenance of the whole soci- 
ety, they recognized a caste whose dependence and subjection 
were far more absolute than their own, and whose sufferings 
and humiliations elevated them in the social scale, by render- 
ing their own freedom not merely an inestimable advantage, 
but a high and honorable distinction also. 

To the domestic slavery which, in the age of Charlemagne, 
had overspread nearly the whole of G-aul, may thus be ascrib- 
ed, not merely much of the origin of the Aristocratic Oligarchy, 
but the welcome acquiescence in that dominion by that class 
from whom alone any resistance to such an encroachment could 
with a»y reason have been anticipated. 

"When the barbarism of the domestic government had thus 
succeeded the barbarism of the government of the state, one 
of the most remarkable results of that political change was the 
disappearance of the laws and institutions by which Charle- 
magne had endeavored to elevate and to civilize his subjects. 
Before the close of the century in which he died, the whole 
body of his laws had fallen into utter disuse throughout the 
whole extent of his G-allic dominions. They who have studied 
the charters, laws, and chronicles of the later Carlovingian 
princes most, diligently, are unanimous in declaring, that they 
indicate either an absolute ignorance or an entire forgetful- 
ness of the legislation of Charlemagne. 

The decretals of the Popes superseded the capitularies of 
the new Emperor of the West over the whole of that debatable 
land which lies between the provinces of the ecclesiastical and 
the secular law-giver. Still more fatal to the authority of his 
code were those local customs, G-allic, Frank, Roman, and 
Celtic, which he had labored in vain to eradicate. As the cen- 
tral power declined and fell, so also disappeared all uniformity 
of judicial and fiscal administration. The G-allic people, ceas- 
ing to think of themselves as members of a great state, or as 
the subjects of a great king, narrowed their thoughts and their 
affections to the canton of which they were inhabitants, to the 
seigneury of which they were vassals, or to the town of which 
they were citizens. In the exercise of his local jurisdiction, 
the lord of every such canton, seigneury, or town took for his 



THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 95 

oTiide tlie maxims and the usages most familiar to his vassals 
and to himself; and when he called on them to aid him in 
warfare with his neighbors, he led them to the field, not with 
the observance of imperial capitularies formerly enacted at Aix- 
la-Chapelle, but by the assertion of such rights as the people 
most readily acknowledged, and by the assumption of such 
powers as his enemies most habjtually feared. 

Charlemagne had been accustomed to convoke his people 
(that is, his free people or military retainers) at the Champs 
de Mai, and there were exhibited some occasional imitations 
of the freedom of speech which had awakened the echoes of 
the Forum in the yet unclouded days of Roman liberty. The 
habit of grandiloquence on such subjects survived even to the 
reign of his grandson, Charles the Bald ; for we read that it 
was proclaimed as a maxim at one of his assemblies, that 
" Lex consensu populi fit, constitutione regis." And yet, from 
that time forward, neither the initiative of the king, nor the 
consent of the people, was ever invoked either to enlarge the 
law or to amend it ; for in his weakness the king was unable 
to enforce, and in their disunion and revolt the people were 
unwilling to render, obedience to the Carlovmgian code, or to 
any additions to it. 

By the ministry of subordinate kings, Charlemagne had 
reigned in Italy and in Aquitaine. His grandson saw both 
of those kingdoms crumble into their elements : the first re- 
solving itself into a group of civic republics ; the second break- 
ing up into the sovereign duchies, or counties of Aquitaine, 
G-ascony, Toulouse, and Auvergne. 

Under Charlemagne the imperial power had been adminis- 
tered by dukes and margraves, his military chiefs ; by counts, 
his civil governors ; and, in theory at least, by the missi do- 
minii, as the general superintendents of his realm. Under 
his grandson, those dukes, margraves, and counts successfully 
asserted their independence, became the real sovereigns of the 
territories over which they had been viceroys, and rendered 
that power hereditary in then- families. The missi dominii, 
who, if you look to the paper constitution only, were the piv- 
ots of the whole imperial administration — the agents by whom 
the eye of the emperor traversed, and his hand reached , every 
part of his vast dominions — silently abdicated theii- obsolete 



96 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

offices, and disappear, one knows not how, from all tlie public 
acts and chronicles of his successors. 

While Charlemagne reigned, the lands in G-aul were still 
distinguished from each other as allodial or as henefioiary ; 
hoth indeed held on the condition of rendering military services 
to the emperor, but the heneficia binding the owner to many 
other services from which the proprietor of allodial lands was 
exempt. But, under his descendants, the holders of the great- 
er estates, allodial or beneficiary, refused to perform the con- 
ditions of their tenures. Their resistance was successful. In 
some cases they became independent lords, acknowledging 
only the superiority of the king himself, which was then lit- 
tle more than nominal. Far more commonly, the estates thus 
emancipated from their duties to the crown became subject, 
either willingly or by force, to some of the greater dukes, 
counts, or margraves ; for in that age, such was the fear of 
domestic tyrants and of foreign enemies, that the weaker land- 
holders gladly acquiesced in assuming feudal obligations to 
their more powerful neighbors in return for their promised 
protection, although by the acceptance of it allodial estates 
were burdened with heavy obligations, from which, till then, 
they had been free. 

Under the rigorous rule of Charlemagne, the Church had 
enjoyed her estates and privileges in undisturbed security. 
His grandsons and their descendants were totally unable to 
protect the monasteries from pillage, or the sacred edifices 
from sacrilege. The advocate, or vidame, of an ecclesiastical 
corporation was usually some powerful count, who, in return 
for his defense of their temporalities, received from them ben- 
efits, temporal as well as spiritual. They rendered him an- 
nual money payments, or acknowledged him as their feudal 
lord, or prayed for his prosperity while living, or promised 
masses for his soul when dead, and a tomb within the abbey 
or cathedral walls for the reception of his body. 

"While the sceptre was still in the hands of Charlemagne, 
the barbarians who menaced the frontiers of his empire were 
vigorously repelled, if not pursued, into their own retreats. 
But, within a few years from his death, the whole of the G-ai- 
lio people, from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, were agitated by 
the unceasing inroads of Scandinavian or Norman pirates. 



THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 97 

Not only had the mighty conqueror departed, hut his people 
seemed to have lost every trace of their ancient heroism. The 
French of the ninth and tenth centuries tremhled hefore the . 
northern invaders with the same abject despair with which, 
in a then distant age, the natives of Peru and Mexico witnessed 
the incursions of their Spanish conquerors. Nor did the fol- 
lowers of Cortez bear a smaller proportion to the armies of 
Montezuma, than the Norman pirates bore to the male popu- 
lation of France. To such a people, the imperial visions of 
Charles the Grreat were just as ill suited as the imperial vis- 
ions of Charles V. 

Charlemagne had extended his hereditary kingdom into a 
mighty empire. His early descendants contracted that same 
kingdom into what may be called an inconsiderable province. 
In addition to all the other dismemberments of it was the 
abandonment to the Normans of that great district which had 
ever since borne their name.' Eventually, indeed, the cession 
of Normandy contributed more than any other single cause to 
the growth and consolidation of the kingdom of France. But 
at that time it indicated, more clearly than any other event, 
the decay into which that kingdom had fallen under the Car- 
lovingian Dynasty. 

The progress of barbarism, in the sense in which I use and 
have explained that word, is, however, most distinctly illus- 
trated by what we may gather from Mabillon's Acts of the 
-Saints of the Benedictine Order, and from the other hagiolo- 
gies of that age. From those legends we learn that large dis- 
tricts of France had, under the later Carlovingian princes, 
been either converted into extensive sheep-walks, or given up 
to the natural growth of the forest. The saint is described in 
them sometimes as inhabiting, and sometimes as traversing, 
these desolate regions ; and as reaching, at frequent intervals, 
either hermitages or oratories, where he pauses, either to wor- 
ship or to seek repose and shelter, on his way to some cele- 
brated shrine. The monastery appears there as no longer em- 
bellished by any of the decorative arts, nor as surrounded by 
its once smiling gardens, nor as tlironged as before by pious 
worshipers, but as converted into a kind of fortress, with deep 
ditches, massive gates, and heavy portcullises, the necessary, 
though often the ineffectual, ramparts against Norman or do- 

G- 



9S THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 

mestic invaders. The town and village also, as depicted in 
these religious biographies, is surrounded by a ditch and pali- 
sades, and defended by a toWer or castle. The baronial resi- 
dence has been transformed from the mansion of a chieftain 
into the fastness of a robber. The burgher, the pilgrim, the 
peddler, the Benedictine monk, and the husbandman, are rep- 
resented as perishing, sometimes by want, sometimes by the 
sword of the foreign marauder, and sometimes by that of the 
neighboring lord ; while, audacious by impunity, the chatc'- 
lain, followed by a long line of lances, is exhibited as falling 
on the helpless traveler, or as extorting by the torch, the sword, 
or the scourge, a ransom from some unprotected monastery. 
Scarcely more attractive is the glance we occasionally obtain 
of the domestic life of this formidable seigneur. "When not 
engaged in the chase, he is portrayed as amusing himself in 
his fortified dwelling, either with boon companions in an in- 
temperate debauch, or as listening to legends of freebooters of 
a yet older time, still more ferocious than himself, or as yield- 
ing to the blandislmients of the courtesans by whom such fast- 
nesses were thronged, or as finding, in the daily masses and 
absolutions of his domestic chaplain, relief from the reproaches 
of his unquiet conscience for the crimes which the succeeding 
day was destined to renew. Even the most populous and 
powerful of the G-allic cities were impotent to resist the spoil- 
ers who thus ravaged the devoted land. Each considerable 
town placed itself under the protection of some military chief- 
tain, who thenceforward became at once the occasional pro- 
tector and the habitual oppressor of the helpless inhabitants. 
Every monastery, in the same manner, sought shelter beneath 
the arms of some warlike seigneur, who, under the title of its 
vidame, afforded the monks protection, on such terms as re- 
duced his monastic clients to a state of continual poverty and 
^larm. 

If, from the aspect of the material and social world thus 
presented to us in the Acta Sanctorum, we turn to the chron- 
iclers of the ninth and tenth centuries, we shall learn that 
while the village, the convent, and the city were thus the prey 
of unrestrained violence, the minds of men were living under 
the despotism of superstitious terrol-s. I do not refer to the 
errors with which Rome had already debased the purity of the 



THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 99 

Christian faith, but to the helief which had heen adopted and 
diffused by the interpreters of the Apocalypse, that the destruc- , 
tion of the world was to be coincident with the lapse of a 
thousand years from the birth of Christ. To what an extent 
this opinion prevailed, and of what strange results it was pro- 
ductive, may be seen in any of those chronicles. Preachers 
came forth announcing that, in the visions of the night, they 
had received from the Savior himself an intimation that his 
second coming was immediately at hand. Mysterious voices' 
were heard to mingle with the winds. Mailed combatants 
were seen to encounter in the clouds. Monstrous births inti- 
mated the dislocation of the whole system of nature. Men. 
sought to propitiate the approaching judge, by giving to the 
Church the lands which were about to perish in the general 
conflagration. In many yet extant charters of that age, 
"mundi termino adpropinquante" is recited as the inducement 
of such donations. The alarm, though of course transitory, 
was yet sufficiently deep and enduring to depress the spirits: 
of more than one generation, and to enhance the gloom of that 
disastrous age. So dismal, indeed, is the description which 
we every where encounter of the state of Graul during the 
century which immediately preceded the accession of Hugues 
Capet, that we might imagine it to have been immersed in a 
darkness like that of Egypt — a darkness which might be felt 
— if experience had not taught us how many of man's dearest 
interests, how much placid enjoyment, mental activity, do- 
mestic peace, and spiritual repose may flourish in those count- 
less retirements which no historian's eye can penetrate, and 
which no historian's pencil can depict. 

From this barbarism of domestic slavery — of aristocratic oli- 
garchy — of departing laws and institutions— of internal rapac- 
ity, and of superstitious terror, was, however, to femerge the 
Feudal Confederation, beneath the shelter of which many so- 
cial calamities were indeed to be fostered, but from which, 
also, was to arise, in the fullness of time, the august monarchy 
of the houses of Yalois and of Bourbon. This transition is 
among the most curious passages in human history. 

Charlemagne had substituted the unity of royal dominion 
for the plurality of aristocratic chiefs. Under his feeble de- 
scendants, as we have seen, that unity of power was dissolved, 



100 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

and the aristocracy resumed and enlarged tlieir domination ; 
until at length, amid the multitude of the armed baronial oli- 
garchs, the power of the monarchy itself expired. Yet the 
people of G-aul never ceased to revere the name and the mem- 
ory of their great king, the hero of so many authentic narra- 
tives, popular ballads, and romantic legends. His sovereignty 
had, indeed, been reduced to little more than a shadow and a 
form. In the main line, all his legitimate posterity were ex- 
tinct. Of his descendants in the female or illegitimate lines, 
no one had any personal claim to respect, or even to endur- 
ance. Yet, first, Charles the Foolish, then Louis From-be- 
yond-Sea, then another Lothaire, and then Louis the Fifth and 
Faineant, were successively permitted to inscribe their worth- 
less names on the French annals as kings of France, during 
the century which elapsed from the deposition of Charles the 
Fat to the accession of the Third or Capetian Dynasty. 

During that century, however, another house was gradually 
rising into influence and authority, and was even invested 
with the royal rank and title. Robert the Strong, count of 
Paris, was the founder of it. Otho or Eudes, his eldest son ; 
Robert, the brother of Otho ; and Raoul, the grandson of the 
first Robert, were one after another invested, by the suffrages 
or acclamations of the people, with the title, thoagh not with 
the power of kings ; for at that time, as I have already noticed, 
that title was not seldom given or assumed as a synonym of 
that of commander-in-chief. Hugues, count of Paris, the son 
of the second and the grandson of the first Robert, became the 
guardian of Louis the Fifth and Faineant ; and, during his 
life, administered the government in his name. But on the 
death of Louis Y., no obstacle any longer opposed the gratifi- 
cation of the hope which had animated Hugues himself, and 
each of his progenitors, during more than a hundred years. By 
the choice of the army, and the assent of the nobles, he ex- 
changed the titles of Count of Paris and Duke of the Duchy 
of France for the title of King of the French people. 

Seldom has any monarch borne a more inappropriate title. 
At the accession of Hugues Capet the French people can hardly 
be said to have existed, and France itself was not a single 
state, but an assemblage of many distinct countries. It was 
peopled by many different races of men, who still regarded 



THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 101 

each other rather as aliens than as fellow-countrymen. The 
followmg is a hrief enumeration of them. 

Occupying the territories between the Meuse and the Seine, 
the Austrasian Franks retained the fair complexion, the flow- 
ing hair, and the imperious spirit of their ancestors. War was 
still the one serious business or cherished pastime of the chiefs. 
But they no longer waged war under the command of their 
Kyning, or their emperor, against foreign nations, but on their 
own behalf, and for their own gain or glory, against the other 
counts and seigneurs their neighbors. Their lands were still 
cultivated by the descendants of the ancient Grallic people as 
serfs, adscripti glebes ; while, by the aid of their free vassals, 
they at one time defended their manors and castles, and at aii- 
other assailed the towers, or made a foray over the lands of 
the chatelains near whom they dwelt. 

The Neustrian Franks, on the other hand, living between 
the Seine and the Loire, had become amalgamated with the 
remains of the ancient Romano-Gallic population ; and with 
enervated minds and softened manners, had betaken themselves 
to the culture of the soil, to an abode in fortified cities, to the 
practice of civic arts, and to the erection of churches, abbeys, 
and other ecclesiastical edifices. To their Norman invaders 
they opposed neither courage nor policy, but submitted to their 
ferocious ravages with the tame pusillanimity which had char- 
acterized the inhabitants of the same territories when invaded, 
five centuries before, by Clovis and his warriors. 

The Burgundians, dwelling in the province which still bears 
their name, but which then extended southward as far as the 
city of Aries, had made greater advances in civilization. They 
had adopted many of the traditions of the old Roman law ; they 
had admired and imitated some of the remains of the ancient 
Roman architecture ; and the Sacerdotal Order was held in 
far higher reverence among them than in Austrasian and 
Neustrian France. 

The Aquitanians, settled in the country between the Loire 
and the Pyrenees, differed widely from the Frankish people of 
a more purely G-ermanic origin. Descended partly from the 
Visigoths, but far more from the G-allic aborigines and the 
ancient Roman colonists of Narbonese Graul, they were distin- 
guished by habits more luxurious and licentious, by a spirit 



102 THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 

more democratic and independent, by greater subtlety of mind, 
and by a far more assiduous culture of poetry and of music, 
than belonged to any other of the great families among which 
Craul was at that time divided. Yet, even in those southern 
and softer regions, the counts and seigneurs had adopted the 
half-savage modes of life, and indulged themselves in the rapa- 
cious tyranny of the feudal lords who inhabited the plains of 
Alsace or Champagne. 

The G-ascons, the Navarrese, and the Basques, though living 
within the limits of France, were a wild race of mountaineers, 
whose language was totally distinct from that of any other of 
the various French populations, and who had, in fact, no in- 
terests, habits, or prejudices in common with theirs. 

The Bretons, also, inhabiting the peninsula which still re- 
tains their name, formed a foreign and independent settlement 
in the centre of Neustrian France, retaining the language, with 
many of the habits and superstitions of their Celtic ancestors; 
and acknowledging a consanguinity rather with the natives of 
Wales and Cornwall, than with the continental people in whose 
immediate vicinity they dwelt. 

Adjacent to them, the Norman pirates, converted at last into 
a sedentary tribe, occupied, by the concession of Charles the 
Foolish, a large part of what had once constituted the kingdom 
of Neustria, and infused not only a nobler spirit, but a higher 
civilization also, into the degenerate race over which they had 
triumphed. 

The preceding review of the various people among whom 
ancient Graui was distributed at the close of the tenth century, 
has little or no correspondence with the political divisions of 
France in the same and in some following ages. Without af- 
fecting minute accuracy, it may be said to have been parcel- 
ed out into eighteen principal fiefs or feudal sovereignties. 

Of these, the duchy of France, combined with the county 
of Paris, may be considered as having been the chief. They 
had formed the patrimonial estates of Hugues Capet and his 
ancestors. They constituted his royal domain when he was 
elevated to the crown of France. Through that domain flowed 
the Seine, the Oise, and the Marne. Within it lay the city 
of Paris, It was, however, under the dominion, rather than 
in the possession, of Hugues and his descendants ; for it was 



THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 103 

divided into a multitude of petty seigneuries, the lords of which 
acknowledged him as at once their king and their feudal su- 
perior. 

In the east, the duchy or province of Burgundy was held 
by the descendants of Hugues the G-reat, who himself had re- 
ceived the investiture of it from Louis-d'Outre-Mer, In the 
north, the race of Rollo the Dane ruled in Normandy. Allain, 
a native Breton, celebrated for the enormous length of his 
beard, and for his successful revolt against the Normans, gov- 
erned Bretagne. The county of Anjou belonged to Foulques 
the Black, renowned for his pillage, liis murders, and his peni- 
tence. Flanders was the fief of the descendants of Baldwin 
of the Iron Arm, the son-in-law of Charles the Bald. It sur- 
rounded a large part of the counties of Hainault and Verman- 
dois ; of which, at the close of the tenth century, Reynier the 
Long-necked was the feudal lord. Robert of Yermandois, who, 
not long before, had expelled the Bishop of Troyes from his 
episcopal church and feudal superiority in that city, was, in 
right of that conquest, acknowledged as Count of Champagne ; 
and Thibault, the son-in-law of Robert the Strong, had trans- 
mitted to his descendants the county of Blois. In the south, 
the duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Poictiers were united 
to the county of Auvergne, in the person of William III., known 
by the strange title of Tete d'Etoupe. Grascony was divided 
into the duchy of that name and the county of Fesenzac. 
Toulouse, with the marquisate of Septimania, already belong- 
ed to the house of Raymond, afterward so renowned for their tri- 
umphs in the Crusades, and for their disasters in the war of the 
Albigenses. The kingdom of Aries, embracing Provence and 
Burgundy, east of the Jura (that is, Switzerland and Savoy), 
was at that period a fief rather of the G-erman than of the 
French suzerain. 

So indeterminate and fluctuating, however, were the divi- 
sions of the ancient Grallic territory at the time of which I 
speak (that is, at the accession of Hugues Capet), that the 
preceding enumeration of them is to be considered only as an 
approach to accuracy. It is, however, sufficiently accurate to 
justify the following general conclusions. 

Fu'st. It shows that the central power of the monarchy was 
now dissipated among the multitude of the greater feudatories. 



104^ THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 

By pursuing the analysis farther, we should ascertain the mi- 
nuteness with which each of those fiefs was itself apportioned 
among a multitude of inferior seigneurs, all of whom again 
subdivided their seigneuries among a yet lower and far more 
numerous race of vassals, and so on indefinitely. Yet, in the 
midst of all this attrition of the state, one principle pervaded 
every member of it. Each tenant owed fealty and homage to 
his immediate superior, from the lowest link of the chain to 
that last and highest link which connected the grand feuda- 
tory with the king himself, as suzerain of the whole of this de- 
scending and ascending series of vassals and of lords. 

Secondly. This enumeration of the chief feudatories of 
France under the first Capetians indicates that great character- 
istic of the age, that is, its barbarism, or the subjugation of man- 
kind to arbitrary will sustained by material power. Allain 
with the long Beard, Foulkes the Audacious and the Black, 
Baldwin of the Iron Arm, Eeynier with the long Neck, and 
Robert the Strong, had those titles ascribed to them in the spir- 
it of a barbarous courtesy, which attributed to the rulers of the 
earth those rude endowments on which they prided themselves, 
and for which alone their subjects valued them. And this sig- 
nificant, though vague indication of the real basis and charac- 
ter of those feudal governments is curiously confirmed and illus- 
trated by the lives and legends of the saints which the Bene- 
dictines and the Bollandists have so laboriously compiled. We 
smile, and not unreasonably, at tales which so often rival in 
extravagance, without ever rivaling in fanc}^, the marvels of 
the Thousand and One Nights, or the revels of Oberon and 
Titania. But there is a deep significance in these seemingly 
unmeaning fables. With every appearance of good faith, 
though but with little semblance of good sense, they describe 
visions, and ecstasies, and heavenly visitants of earth, and 
grotesque miracles, and the discovery of relics and their heal- 
ing virtue, and, above all, the intervention in sublunary afiairs 
of her who " was blessed above women," and of the saints who 
are supposed to encircle her celestial throne. But these fic- 
tions, however puerile, are not without a meaning. They at- 
test that their authors were living at a period when the ideal 
of human existence, the very poetry of life, consisted in meek 
suffering, in patient enduranee, in pouring oil into the bleed- 



THE CARLOVINCtIAN DYNASTY. 105 

ing wounds of a groaning world, and in escaping from its Ijond- 
age and oppression, its lust and cruelty, into communion with 
more than female tenderness, and with more than angelic pu- 
rity. 

The third inference from the catalogue of the chief feuda- 
tories of France is, that the duchy of that name possessed pe- 
culiar advantages in the long struggle m which it was ahout 
to engage for a real as well as a nominal supremacy over the 
realm at large. Lying in the centre of so many fiefs, more 
warlike, populous, and extensive than itself, it detached and 
separated them from each other. It was thus prepared to make 
hostile aggressions on each of them in turn, and to find in all 
of them, successively, so many shields to avert from itself the 
inroads of foreign invaders. As duke of the duchy of France 
and count of Paris, Hugues Capet assumed the title of king, 
and transmitted it to his descendants with a prestige and a 
propriety which could not have been emulated hy any of the 
lords of any of the surrounding states ; for, under the two first 
dynasties, Paris had been the capital of the whole G-allic king- 
dom. The duchy in which it lay had, therefore, been regard- 
ed as metropolitan. There Hugues and his ancestors had long, 
and not ingloriously, struggled in the national cause against 
both the Norman and the Grerman standards. And there he 
had received, by the acclamations of his army, a crown in 
which the other feudatories saw, or thought they saw, the 
keystone of the arch of their own baronial power ; for their 
dominion over their vassals rested on a theory of tenures and 
dependencies which supposed the existence of some ultimate 
suzerain from whom their own fiefs were holden, and in whom 
the whole feudal hierarchy had their common head, and stay, 
and centre. And, therefore, the dukes of Normandy and 
Aquitaine, the counts of Flanders and of Toulouse, potent as 
they were, and exempt, as they conceived themselves to be, 
from any authority or control of Hugues Capet within their 
own duchies and counties, were prompt to render to him the 
formal homage due to the author, or, rather, to the imaginary 
author, of their own local dominion. They were not aware of 
the mighty force of names and titles, of fictions and of forms ; 
and especially of their force when shadowing out any of the 
real substrata of the peace, and order, and social prosperity of 



106 THE DECLINE AND FALL, ETC. 

mankind. They knelt down with closed hands, and recited 
solemn vows before a titular sovereign, and did not perceive or 
foresee that they were thus gradually elevating that empty 
pageant of royalty into an effective sovereign, destined, at no 
remote period, to attain prerogatives by which their own states 
would be subjugated, and their posterity reduced to insignif- 
icance and want. 

And now, reverting to the question with which I commenced 
this lecture, it remains for me to gather, from the preceding 
statements, the answer to the inquiry — What were the causes 
of the transfer of the dominion of France from the Second Dy- 
nasty to the Third, from the lineage of Pepin to that of Hugues 
Capet? My answer is the same as that which I returned to 
the question — What were the causes of the transfer of the 
Franco-Grallic empire from the First Dynasty to the Second ? 
In either case the cause was " Barbarism," in the sense in 
which I have already explained that word. In each case so- 
ciety was in a condition in which government w^s not and 
could not have been maintained by moral restraints and influ- 
ences, but was and could have been maintained only by phys- 
ical force on the side of the rulers, and by abject terror on the 
side of the people. But in these two cases there was a ma- 
terial distinction. Though barbarism was the active cause in 
both, it worked in each in a different way and in an opposite 
direction. The barbarism of Clovis and his descendants ren- 
dered them incapable of establishing a moral dominion, and 
therefore incapable of establishing an enduring dominion. The 
barbarism of the Franco-Grallic people rendered them incapa- 
ble of enduring the moral dominion of Charlemagne and his 
successors, and therefore brought that dominion to an abrupt 
and untimely end. Barbarism was the aggressive power in 
the first case, and the resisting power in the second case. In 
either case it was the successful power. Such at least is the 
best conclusion which I have been able to draw from such 
study as it has bedn in my power to bestow on these much 
controverted passages of the history of France. 



THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE, ETC. 107 



LECTURE V. 

ON THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 

Bearing in mind M. Gruizot's remark, tliat the progress and 
true character of a nation can never be studied successfully 
except by ascending to the origin of its laws, habits, and in- 
stitutions, I have hitherto lingered. at the earlier stages of the 
history of France. But now, when I have reached the period 
at which the Feudal Confederation had become organized into 
a settled form of political government, I am unable any lon- 
ger to adhere to that maxim, incontrovertible though it be; 
for if I should still contiime to be guided by it, and should 
undertake any complete survey of that system, the whole of 
the time which the laws of the University have placed at my 
disposal during our academical year would be insufficient for 
the purpose. But M. Gruizot himself, and our fellow-country- 
men. Dr. Robertson and Mr. Hallam, have happily provided 
me with an effectual escape from this difficulty. In their re- 
searches into the origin, the progress, and the tendencies of 
Feudalism in France, they have left unexplained no question 
connected with it, whether considered as a body of laws, as a 
social polity, or as a code of moral sentiments, but have laid 
bare all the more recondite, as well as all the more obvious 
springs of human action by which, under each of those aspects, 
it was either nurtured, or mitigated, or developed. Futile as 
would be the attempt to emulate those illustrious authors, it 
would be almost equally superfluous to follow and to repeat 
them. Assuming, then, that their writings on this subject 
will receive from you the attention to which they have so pre- 
eminent a title, I pass on, in pursuance of the design which I 
have already intimated, to inquire in what manner the French 
municipalities contributed to conduct France from the state of 
a Feudal Confederation to that of an absolute Monarchy ? 

And here again I must begin by referring you to the guid- 
ance of M. Gruizot, in the first of whose essays you will find 



108 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

an inoomparaLle review of the gelations between imperial 
Rome and her civic dependencies in Graul ; and of the efTect 
of those relations in hastening the ruin of the province and the 
dismemherment of the empire. "Wonderful indeed was the 
vital power of those municipal communities. Five centuries 
had passed away after G-enserio and Odoacer had swept the 
capital of the Western world with the hesom of destruction. 
The G-oths, the Burgundians, the Franks, the Saracens, and 
the Normans, had each in turn conquered and pillaged G-aul. 
Amid the anarchy of the later Carlo vingian kingdom, hrute 
force had assumed the dominion of France, and Feudalism 
had then arisen to give to oppression all the systematic energy 
of law. But while one billow after another had thus obliter- 
ated the other reinains of civilization in the Romano-G-allic 
province, the eleventh century still found surviving there the 
municipia which Rome had founded, cherishing the traditions, 
and maintaining not a few of the customs transmitted to them 
from their predecessors through the long lapse of more than a 
thousand years. 

Those customs had, indeed, undergone many essential alter- 
ations, some affecting their outward forms, and others relating 
to their inward principle ; and, among those changes, the lat- 
est and most remarkable was the progressive substitution of a 
democratic spirit for that aristocratic character by which the 
civic governments of G-aul had been distinguished under the 
dynasty of the Caesars. 

The curia of a Romano-G-allio city was what, in our mod- 
ern phraseology, would be called a self-electing body. All va- 
cancies, as they occurred, were filled up by nominations made 
by the Curiales themselves, and it was their habit to nominate 
to that office only the members of the chief families of the place. 
Every such city was therefore, in effect, a commonwealth, 
governed by an oligarchy at once elective and hereditary. 
But as each of them in turn became the seat of an episco- 
pal diocese, the bishop of each added to his spiritual power a 
great and direct secular authority, and yet a greater, though 
indirect, secular influence, within its precincts. When, pro- 
gressively, the feudal hierarchy extended their dominion over 
these cities, the bishop himself sometimes became the seigneur 
of the metropolis of his own diocese. In other cases he made 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 109 

a -subinfeudation of it to an inferior seigneur, to wliom he 
thenceforward bore the relation of immediate suzerain. Some- 
times the supreme suzerain (that is, the king) was represent- 
ed in such a civic fief by the count or viscount as his deputy ; 
but more commonly some great neighboring lord claimed the 
protectorate of the city, and with it a feudal superiority over 
the inhabitants. But whatever might be the variations of out- 
ward form under which the seignorial rule extended itself over 
the ancient Roman municipalities, the remembrance of their 
ancestral franchises still animated the citizens to jesent the 
degradation to which such encroachments subjected them, and 
to regret and exaggerate the evils consequent on the loss of 
their former independence. 

The popular mind, when so agitated, habitually addressed 
itself, for support and encouragement, to the bishop ; not mere- 
ly because in that age, as in all ages, the Church was the 
firmest bulwark of the rights of the feebler many against the 
usurpations of the stronger few, but because, in those times 
and places, the bishop had strong and peculiar motives for the 
advocacy of their cause. The local aristocracy of the city were, 
for the most part, the vassals of the count or of the seigneur, 
and were, therefore, his partisans in assailing the political and 
proprietary rights of the diocesan himself. The local common- 
alty were, on the other hand, the usual supporters of the bish- 
op in the defense of his secular privileges, and were therefore, 
in turn, supported by him in the resumption of their own. 
He thus became the habitual antagonist of the civic aristoc- 
racy, and the habitual protector of the great body of the citi- 
zens against them. And thus it happened that, before the end 
of the eleventh century, the choice of the municipal officers 
had been silently but effectually transferred, under the shelter 
of the crosier, from the privileged minority to the great bulk 
of the townsmen, whose zeal for the conservation of their new- 
ly-acquired elective franchise induced them to call it from year 
to year into active exercise. 

At about the same period, the contest between Pope Grego- 
ry YII. and the Emperor Henry IV., and their respective suc- 
cessors, enabled the chief cities of Tuscany and Lombardy to 
erect themselves into free republics, which were essentially in- 
dependent of both the contending powers, temporal and eccle- 



110 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 

siastical, though, they acknowledged a remote and almost nom- 
inal subordination to the emperor as their supreme suzerain. 
In the exercise of that independence, they elected their own 
civic rulers, and bestowed on them the once venerated title 
of consuls. Now, so intimate were the commercial relations 
which united these new Italian republics to the great French 
cities in their vicinity, that the spirit of revolt and of imita- 
tion spread rapidly from the southward to the northward of the 
Alps ; from G-enoa, Milan, Pisa, and Florence, to Marseilles, 
Aries, Montauban, and Toulouse. And thus municipal free- 
dom was yet more firmly established, and consuls were elect- 
ed, in the south of France also ; and thus a complete though 
pacific revolution was accomplished, Avhich left to the Cape- 
tian monarchs little more than a nominal sovereignty within 
the walls of the principal towns of that part of their dominions. 
Of the actvial progress of this change little account has been 
transmitted to us by the chroniclers of those times, though, in 
the reign of Louis VI., it seems to have been fully established 
throughout nearly one third of the territories comprised within 
what we now call the French Republic. To the north of the 
Loire the towns were at that time nothing more than so many 
urban seigneuries, the lords of which were dwelling in fast- 
nesses either within the walls or in their immediate vicinity. 
Many of those towns were, indeed, also episcopal sees ; but as 
the inhabitants possessed no municipal constitutions or fran- 
chises, so neither did they contract with their bishops any such 
alliances as those which the bishops in the south had formed 
with the inhabitants of their respective metropolitan cities. 
That these northern and unprivileged towns would regard with 
discontent the contrast between their own condition and that 
of the ancient municipia might well have been anticipated, 
even if that unfavorable distinction had affected merely the 
sentiment of honor or of self-importance ; but it really extend- 
ed to the most substantial and weighty concerns of life. The 
seigneur claimed the right to subject his ignoble vassals, civic 
as well as rural, to tolls and other vexatious imposts. With- 
out his license, a widow might not contract a second nuptials, 
nor a father bestow his daughter in marriage. Immovable 
property could not be disposed of by testamentary donation,, 
nor even by an alienation inter vivos, except with his concur-, 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. Ill 

rence. He might seize to his own use the goods of his de- 
ceased tenant, unless, within a prescribed and brief period, the 
next of kin made good their claim to the inheritance. All free- 
dom of trade within the town was dependent on his pleasure ; 
and by him in effect, if not in form, all, the local magistracy 
were appointed. Yast and arbitrary as were these powers, 
even according to the mere letter of the law, tliey were still 
iriore oppressive in practice ; and when Louis le Gros ascend- 
ed the French throne, the people of these seignorial cities had 
begun to assemble in the markets and other places of public re- 
sort — to debate their grievances — ^to compare their own phys- 
ical strength with that of their oppressors — to agitate for 
change — and to devise the methods by which it might be most 
effectually accomplished. 

The French historians, ever anxious, and ever subtle to de- 
tect the more secret springs by which either the mere surface 
or the depths of human affairs are agitated, have adopted two 
antagonist theories for explaining the events which followed. 
Yelly and the monarchical writers maintain that Louis le G-ros 
perceived in the popular excitement which was spreading from 
one town or city to another, a force which might be employed 
to undermine the feudal, and to enlarge the royal authority. 
They suppose him to have entered into a tacit alliance with 
the discontented citizens throughout the realm, on the basis 
that he should bestow on them acts of incorporation or en- 
franchisement, and that they should acknowledge him, not 
merely as their suzerain, but as their seigneur. From this 
union of the commonalty with royalty, the far-sighted king, 
according to this theory, anticipated the gradual decline and 
the ultimate disappearance of that feudal dominion, in the 
presence of which his own sovereignty existed rather as a 
pageant and a fiction than as a reality and a truth. 

Nor does the title of Louis VL to the glory of having thus 
enfranchised the civic population of France, rest on the suf- 
frages of literary historians alone. His successor, Louis 
XVIIL, in the constitutional charter which he promulgated 
on his restoration in the year 1814, wrote as follows : "We 
have considered that although, in France, all authority re- 
sided in the person of the king, yet our predecessors have not 
hesitated to modify the exercise of it according to the differ- 



112 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

ences of successive times ; and that thus it happened that the 
communes owed their enfranchisement to Louis le Grros ; and 
to Saint Louis and Philippe le Bel, the confirmation and exten- 
sion of their privileges." 'To this hypothesis, and to the royal 
authority thus pledged to the support of it, the French writers 
since the Restoration, and especially MM. Sismondi and Thi- 
erry, have opposed another theory. They maintain that the 
share actually taken by Louis le G-ros in the enfranchisement 
of the communes was inconsiderable in its effect, and was dic- 
tated by none but the most obvious motives of immediate pe- 
cuniary interest. But they ascribe to the civic population of 
France, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, a 
revplutionary spirit, and a series of revolutionary achievements, 
differing from those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
in nothing except in the narrowness of the theatre on which 
they were exhibited. In this correspondence in the spirit and 
designs of the popular movements in ages so distant from each 
other, those writers find proof of a certain indestructible iden- 
tity of the national character from the earliest to the most re- 
cent times ; a tradition which, while it imparts a kind of ret- 
rospective dignity to the civic commotions of their remote an- 
cestors, suggests also an apology for those convulsive move- 
ments of France which, during the last threescore years, have 
refused to Europe more than a few short and precarious inter- 
vals of repose. 

Bach of these accounts of the origin of the civil liberties of 
the French people may, with little hazard, be regarded as 
nothing more than one of the attempts to generalize with un- 
due rapidity, to which their philosophical historians are so 
much addicted. That Louis le G-ros anticipated the remote 
results of his alliance with the communes against the feudal 
lords of his kingdom, and that his actual policy was dictated 
by that anticipation, is an hypothesis contradicted, not only 
by the common experience of mankind, and by all that we 
know of his personal character, but by the incontestable facts 
of the case ; for we have neither any record nor any tradition 
of his having enfranchised more than eight cities in all. In 
every one of those cases he interfered, not as an ally of the 
citizens against their oppressors, but as an arbiter between the 
people and two or more of their seigneurs, who were themselves 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 113 

at variance with each other about the recognition of the popu- 
lar claims. Each of the eight cities in favor of which Louis 
thus exercised his authority was within the confines of the 
Somme, the Oise, and the Seine ; that is, within the royal do- 
main or old hereditary sovereignty of Hugues Capet and his 
ancestors. The seigneurs of those cities were, moreover, all 
of them petty chiefs, holding immediately of Louis himself. 
To have interposed in the same manner against his grand 
feudatories, such as the Dukes or Counts of Normandy, of 
Flanders, of Vermandois, of Anjou, or of Toulouse, would have 
appeared to him, and to them, as a wild and audacious ex- 
travagance. His views, whether more or less profound, were 
confined to the duchy of France, and did not extend to the 
kingdom of France. And, finally, a reference to such of his 
grants as are still extant will show how large an influence 
was exercised over him hy a motive of all others the least rec- 
ondite and capacious ; that is, hy his want of ready money, a 
round sum of which he obtained in return for every enfran- 
chisement to which he set his seal. 

On the other hand, the theory that the communes of France 
were wrested from the rulers of the land, royal or feudal, by 
a series of popular revolts, shadowing forth in miniature and 
dim perspective those gigantic struggles which, since the year 
1789, have overtluown so many successive French dynasties, 
is an opinion which could never have been seriously propound- 
ed by men illustrious for ability and for learning, if they had 
not also been men pledged to discover some theory for every 
fact, and some facts for every theory ; for, first, there is no 
reason to conclude, or even to conjecture, that popular violence 
either induced or preceded the acts by which Louis le G-ros 
established the communes of Noyon or of St. Quentin, al- 
though these were the earliest of his concessions of that nature, 
and became the precedents for those which followed ; and, 
secondly, as the enfranchisement of the communes was in 
progress during the reigns of the twelve immediate successors 
of the sixth Louis, we can not ac(|uiesce in the revolutionary 
explanation of that phenomenon, unless we suppose that the 
sacred right of insurrection was a right had in honor and exer- 
cised in France during more than three successive centuries ; 
and, thirdly, amid the multitude of royal acts confirming com- 

H 



114 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

munes whioli have come down to us (there are, if my compu- 
tation he accurate, no less than seventy-five in the eleventh 
volume of " Les Ordonnances des Rois de France"), the pro- 
portion is enormously great of those v\'hich no evidence, in- 
trinsic or extrinsic, connects with any popular insurrection, 
revolt, or disturhanoe whatever. 

In this case, as in many others, the admiration with which 
we at first contemplate an apophthegm or an epigram which 
grasps, or seems to grasp, within its narrow limits, the con- 
densed history of a great people, gives way to disappointment 
when such an analytical expression is employed to resolve the 
obstinate problems which chronicles and chronology will throw 
in our way, as we descend from the elevated regions of his- 
torical philosophy to the humbler level of historical narrative. 
To understand what the communes really were, what was the 
nature, what the design, what the method, and what the re- 
sults of their enfranchisement, we must inevitably pursue an 
obscure and a tedious path. 

To the advocates of the insurrectionary theory it must, 
however, be conceded, that the charters by which the kings 
or the grand feudatories of France effected this great social 
innovation do emphatically attest that, in many oases, it orig- 
inated in the popular resentment for intolerable wrongs. 
Some familiarity with the origin and growth of royal charters, 
in which the king in person is made to interpret the motives 
of his own administrative acts, may perhaps have indisposed 
me to attach to such prefatory language the weight which 
others have ascribed to it. Yet, even on the supposition that, 
from the days of Louis VI. to those of Charles VI., there was 
in France a succession of such legal fabricators of grants of 
the crown as at the present day are in attendance on the min- 
isters of an English sovereign, it must be concluded that 
those erudite persons had some motive for ringing the changes 
on the popular complaints with which their productions are' 
so frequently introduced. Sometimes the confirmatory grant 
is made "pro nimia oppres«ione pauperum" — or "ob enorrai- 
tates clericorum" — or "de pace conservanda" — or "ut cives 
sua propria jura melius defendere possint, et magis integre 
custodire" — or "propter injurias et molestias, a potentibus 
terrae, burgensibus frequenter illatas" — or (in one case) 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE, 115 

" quod alter alteri auxiliabitur et quod nullatenus patientur, 
quod aliquis alioui aliquid auferat." 

Whimsica] as is this phraseology, it was probably the ve- 
hicle for much sound sense and substantial justice. That, 
however, was not the opinion of 'such of the seigneurs of the 
age of Louis le G-ros as were learned enough to commit their 
thoughts to writing. There was living, at that time, G-uibert, 
abbot of Nogent, whose autobiography still exists to attest his 
abhorrence of the civic innovations of which he was the reluc- 
tant, but inquisitive eye-witness., "The object (as he indig- 
nantly remarks) of a commune (novum et funestum nomen) 
is to emancipate all censitaires from servitude, in return for a 
fixed annual payment ; to prevent any punishment for a viola- 
tion of the law except a penalty of which the amount has been 
determined and prescribed beforehand ; and to deliver the serfs 
from all the other imposts to which they are lawfully subject." 
Nor was Guibert singular in his resentment at the regard thus 
shown for the servile or plebeian orders of society. " Yene- 
rabilis et sapiens Archiepiscopus Rhemensis," he informs us 
in another place, " inter missas sermonem habuit de execra- 
bilibus communiis illis." 

"We must not, however, hastily or very sternly condemn this 
aristocratic jealousy ; for although (as I have said) many of 
the communes were enfranchised without any insurrectionary 
movement, yet G-uibert has delineated some of the reformers 
of his day in attitudes which might seem to reduce the re- 
forming Frenchmen of our awn times to the character of hum- 
ble parodists. His narratives would supply excellent materials 
for many a historical romance. The following specimen of 
them has been repeatedly made to answer the ends of histori- 
cal inquiry. 

In the reign of Louis le G-ros, Laon was a place of great 
dignity and importance ; and, among those cities of France 
which were not holdcn of any of the greater feudatories of the 
crown, Paris alone exceeded it in population and wealth. In 
the year 1108, Naudrie, a Norman, who was engaged in the 
service of our Henry I., became the bishop of the see, and, in 
that capacity, the seigneur of the episcopal fief and city of 
Laon. Eegardless of the sanctity of his office, Naudrie was a 
huntsman, a warrior, and a freebooter. Regardless of the feel- 



116 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

ings of society, lie gave in to the military fashion of his age^ 
by entertaining in his suite a negro, whose turban and cym- 
bals designated him, in all ceremonies, as part of the spoils 
brought by the first Crusaders to Europe. At other times the 
Saracen (for so he was called) was employed in executing his 
master's sentences of death or of torture on the objects of his 
judicial or of his personal displeasure. 

It was one of the habits of this marshal-prelate to make oc- 
casional visits to England, that he might secure to himself a 
share in the plunder of the conquered islanders ; and, during 
one of those journeys, the citizens of Laon, emulous of the 
success of their neighbors at Noyon and St. Q,uentin, met to- 
gether, agreed upon a scheme of municipal government, pledged 
themselves to each other by oaths to the observance of it, and 
induced the nobles and clergy of the city to swear that they 
also would acknowledge and respect it. On his return from 
his English raid, Naudrie found himself, to his equal surprise 
and indignation, surrounded, not, as formerly, by mere serfs 
and censitaires, his unresisting subjects, but by a body of cit- 
izens, asserting their right to the free and independent exer- 
cise of the most ample municipal franchises. The prompt offer 
of a large sum of money, however, soothed his resentment, and 
persuaded him. to renounce, in favor of the new commune, all 
his own seignorial rights, and to bind himself by oath to re- 
spect and maintain their privileges. A similar offering to 
Louis le Grros procured from him letters patent confirmatory 
of the civil constitution, and peace and freedom seemed for a 
while to be firmly established at Laon. 

Ere long, however, the want of money and the loss of power 
awakened the bishop and the nobles to a painful sense of the 
sacrifice they had made, and to a keen desire to regain their 
former authority. The king having, on their invitation, come 
to Laon to celebrate the festival of Easter, the bishop offered 
him 700 livres as the price of revoking his recent charter. The 
citizens offered him 400 as the price of confirming it. The 
higher bidding being accepted, the letters patent were solemnly 
recalled, A storm of retributive vengeance followed. The cry 
of " Commune I" " Commune !" became the constant watch- 
word of conspiracies and civic tumults. The bishop's person 
was repeatedly assailed, his, mansion besieged, his church con- 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OP FRANCE. 117 

verted into a tarrack and an arsenal ; and the nobles who came 
to his rescue were massacred without distinction, or pity, or 
remorse. As his last chance of escape from his incensed ene- 
mies, the bishop took refuge in his own cellar, and concealed 
himself there in an empty wine-cask. One Thiegaud, a man 
to whom, for his brutal appearance and manners, the bishop 
had given the sobriquet of Isengrin, or Master Wolf, raised the 
lid of the cask and drew him out of it by the hair of the head, 
exclaiming, " So this, Master Wolf, is your den !" The un- 
happy man was dragged along the streets, overwhelmed at 
every step with filth, and blows, and the vilest insults ; till one 
of his persecutors, more merciful than the rest, clove his skull 
with an ax, when the implacable Thiegaud mutilated and 
stripped his body. It remained a whole day naked and ex- 
posed, a mark at which every passer-by (says Gruibert) direct- 
ed mud and stones, accompanied by insults, by ridicule, and 
by execrations. 

The fury pf the people was then directed against the sur- 
viving nobles, and against the wives and daughters of all whom 
they regarded as their enemies. Murder, conflagi-ation, and 
crime in every form reigned without control tlnrough the de- 
voted city. Houses, churches, and monasteries disappeared 
in the flames, till, wearied with their own excesses, and dread- 
ing their well-merited punishments, a large body of the towns- 
men abandoned the place, and sought beyond its precincts for 
alliances to defend them against the expected vengeance of 
the king. They found such a defender in Thomas de Marie, 
the lord of Crecy. But while the negotiations with him were 
in progress, the inhabitants of the neighboring towns and vil- 
lages were conducted by the nobles into Laon, and under their 
orders commenced a new series of massacres and plunder on 
the persons and the property of the townsmen. At the same 
time the king, marching against Thomas de Marie, besieged 
and took the town or castle of Crecy, and having put to death 
all the fugitive insurgents who were found there, left their 
bodies a prey to the wolves and vultures. A warfare of six- 
teen years' continuance between the contending factions fol- 
lowed. It reduced Laon to utter ruin, but not to peace ; and, 
after a succession of perjuries, murders, cruelties, and abomi- 
nations, to which the French Revolution alone can supply a 



118 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 

parallel, the strife at last ended just where it had commenced ; 
that is, by a formal acknowledgment and confirmation, by 
Louis le G-ros, of the commune of this indomitable city. 

Now, although I can not subscribe to the inference so often 
drawn from this narrative, that insurrection and bloodshed 
have in France a prescriptive claim to be regarded as the le- 
gitimate basis of civil liberty, there are some other conclusions, 
at once more important and more indisputable, which it seems 
to me to illustrate, if not to establish. To explain those con- 
clusions, it is necessary to define some words which, in the 
discussion of this subject, are not unfrequently used in an 
improper or in an equivocal sense. 

In France, the word " Bourg" originally meant any aggre- 
gation of houses, from the greatest city to the smallest ham- 
let. But when, in consequence of the anarchy of the tenth 
and eleventh centuries, every town, and almost every village, 
was fortified, the word shifted its meaning, and came to sig- 
nify an assemblage of houses surrounded with walls. Sec- 
ondly, the word " Bourgeois" also was at first used as synony- 
mous with the inhabitant of a bourg. Afterward, when cor- 
porate franchises were bestowed on particular bourgs, the word 
acquired a sense corresponding with that of the English des- 
ignation Burgess ; that is, a person entitled to the privileges 
of a municipal corporation. Finally, the word " Bourgeoisie," 
in its primitive sense, was the description of the burgesses 
when spoken of collectively. But, in its later use, the word 
would be best rendered into English by our term citizenship ; 
that is, the privilege or franchise of being a burgess. It is in 
these secondary or acquired senses of the words, bourg, bour- 
geois, and bourgeoisie, that I shall employ them in the sequel. 

The history of the birth of the commune of Laon, darkened 
though it be by folly and by crime, yet shows that, even then, 
the rude feudal lords and their still ruder vassals respected 
those maxims of law on this subject which were so solemnly 
recognized during the three immediately succeeding centuries ; 
for, first, they acted on the rule that the legal effect of estab- 
lishing a commune was not to extinguish the seigneurie, but 
to transfer it to the citizens themselves. The bourgeois did 
not cease to be feudal tenants. They merely ceased to be 
tenants to their former lord, becoming tenants to a new lord, 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 119 

that is, the corporate body of which they were themselves 
members. The lordship was held by the bourgeois in trust 
for the bourgeois. Succeeding to the legislative powers of 
the seigneur, the commune made by-laws ; succeeding to his 
judicial powers, they elected magistrates for the effective ex- 
ercise of them. The great communal franchise of self-govern- 
ment, legislative and judicial, was, in fact, the acquisition and 
the use by the local democracy, for democratic purposes, of the 
powers formerly enjoyed and abused by the local despotism 
for despotic purposes. 

Secondly, The people of Laou acted on the rule that the 
only legal basis of a commune was a conjuratio, that is, a 
compact of the inhabitants confirmed by their oaths to each 
other. The principle of that rule was, that the renunciation 
of the feudal dependence of the citizens on their lord, and 
their acceptance of the fief with all its attendant duties, were 
acts which supposed the free exercise of their own free choice ; 
for no man, or body of men, could be lawfully constrained 
either to renounce the benefits of vassalage, or to assume the 
obligations of lordship. These were chains which were at 
least supposed to be worn voluntarily. Feudality always ren- 
dered this kind of formal tribute to the freedom which it sub- 
stantially violated. 

Thirdly. The civic revolution of Laon illustrates the rule 
that no such conjuratio was valid merely by the act of the 
citizens themselves who were to be enfranchised, but that it 
was also necessary that the clergy and the nobles should sig- 
nify their acquiescence in the change, and should guarantee 
the maintenance of it ; and that it should be farther sanctioned 
by the seigneur, whose feudal superiority was to be renounced. 
The meaning of this rule was, simply, that no one whose rights 
would be diminished or affected by the contemplated innova- 
tion, should sustain any such loss or detriment, until it had 
been clearly established that his consent had been fnst asked 
and given. " Non licet Burgensibus communiam facere sine 
senior is consensu," is a maxim to be found in some of the 
confirmatory acts of Louis YII, Thus Bishop Naudrie was 
not deposed from the seigneurie of Laon. He expressly abdi- 
cated it. 

Fourthly. The confirmation of the king as suzerain was 



120 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

considered essential to the creation of the commune at Laon, 
as it was, in later times, to the lawful establishment of any 
other commune ; for the rights of the supreme lord might not 
he abridged without his own express permission. Such royal 
confirmations were often repeated in consideration of money 
payments, and in many cases at intervals so short and so 
regular, that the crown obtained from this source a revenue 
eflfectually replacing that which, if the seigneurie had not 
been transferred to the commune, would have been payable 
on the deaths or alienations of the tenants. It should be 
observed, however, that before the confirmation of the king 
had been actually pronounced, a commune might exist by suf- 
ferance. Yet, when resting on sufferance merely, it might 
also be suppressed by the suzerain at his pleasure ; for, until 
he had converted the usurped power into a legal right, it was 
considered in point of law as a mere revolt. 

Lastly. It seems fit to notice that in early times the sov- 
ereign did not interfere for the creation or confirmation of com- 
munes, except within the limits of the royal domain. The 
power of confirming communes created by a conjuratio was 
exercised by qach of the greater feudatories within his own 
duchy or county, and not by the king. Yet, with the gradual 
increase of the power of the crown, this distinction fell into 
disuse, so that, as early as the year 1183, the duke of so great 
a fief as that of Burgundy obtained from Philippe Auguste the 
confirmation of a commune, granted by himself to the citizens 
of Dijon. 

Quitting now the particular case of Laon, I observe that, at 
the time of the conjuratio at that place, there were existing, 
in many parts of France, bourgs of yet another species. These 
were in the enjoyment of civic franchises more or less ample, 
not by a traditionary right as in the South, nor by a revolt as 
in the communal towns, but by charters granted to them by 
their royal, or noble, or episcopal seigneurs. Such charters 
ascertained what were the customs by which the citizens were 
to be governed, and by which the rights and duties of the 
grantor as their lord, and of themselves as his vassals, were to 
be determined. To insure the due observance of those cus- 
tomary laws, the lord delegated his own seignorial authority 
to an officer called a Prevot. From that circumstance such 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF PRANCE. 121 

bourgs acquired the name of Prevotal cities. To this class "be- 
longed Paris, and many other places of gi-eat importance. 

The liberties of the Prevotal cities were generally less ex- 
tensive and absolute than those of the ancient municipia, or 
than those of the communes. They rested, however, on a 
firmer basis, and were defended by more powerful guarantees. 
Holding those liberties, not by usurpation, but by the free will 
of the seigneur, or at least by his deliberate and unconstrained 
choice, the citizens had nothing to fear from his vindictive re- 
sentment, and not much from his avarice. The main prin- 
ciple of their urban polity was, that they were not the inher- 
itors nor the conquerors, but the grantees of their privileges. 
The fundamental maxim of their urban policy was, therefore, 
to multiply and to strengthen the bands which connected them 
with the author of their corporate existence. 

But the king as seigneur, or as supreme suzerain, was in 
all cases either the direct and immediate, or the indirect and 
more remote author of it. The Prevotal cities were thus drawn 
into an early and intimate alliance with him, and were always 
found among the most active supporters of the authority of 
the crown. 

Three important consequences followed. First, as the in- 
ternal constitution of the Prevotal cities was the most secure 
and beneficial of all the forms of French civic government, so 
it became the normal type, toward which every other form was 
drawn into a welcome and continually-increasing resemblance. 
Secondly, as the Prevotal cities were attached to the royal 
power, and courted its alliance and support, so the same roy- 
alist tendency was gradually developed in the other munici- 
palities, traditional or communal, which were emulous of their 
advantages. And, thirdly, by the plastic influence of that royal 
power on the institutions of all those bourgs (its willing sub- 
jects), the various elements of the municipal system of France 
were at length brought, if not into an absolute uniformity, at 
least into a general similitude and correspondence with each~ 
other. 

I will not pause to indicate the steps of this gradual and 
perhaps unheeded revolution, which, however, may be traced 
in the "Ordonnances des Rois de France," from the age of 
Philippe Auguste, when it commenced, till the end of the fif- 



<?- 



122 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 

teenth century, when it v/as completed. For my present pur- 
pose it is enough to say, that, with the disappearance of the 
distinctions between the three different classes of bourgs, there 
also disappeared most of the ancient differences between the 
rights enjoyed by the bourgeois of each. Throughout the 
whole of France the bourgeoisie became, if not exactly iden- 
tical, yet so much and so nearly so as to enable us to disregard 
those minor variations, which belong rather to the history of 
particular cities than of the whole kingdom. I proceed, then, 
to inquire, in whom the bourgeoisie was vested ; what were 
the privileges it conferred ; what were the obligations which 
it imposed ; how it impaired the strength of the Feudal Con- 
federation ; and by what methods the power of the bourgs them- 
selves was at length subverted ? 

First, then, no man could be a bourgeois unless he were free ; 
that is, no serf could acquire that franchise so long as he re- 
tained his servile character. For this rule the lawyers as- 
signed a technical reason. No serf, they observed, could hold 
any seignorial rights ; and therefore no such person could be 
one of those citizens in whom, collectively, the seigneurie of 
the bourg was vested. The broader aijd more solid foundation 
of the doctrine was, that these municipal communities favored 
and promoted personal liberty. In all of them, every serf, after 
a short residence within the walls, was enabled, by a prompt 
and easy process, to acquire his enfranchisement, and when so 
enfranchised, he was entitled to become a bourgeois. His tem- 
porary exclusion from that advantage had, therefore, the effect 
of conducting him to the early and complete enjoyment of it. 
Thus that impatience of the presence of slavery, for which the 
soil of England has been extolled by judges, by poets, and by 
orators, and that impatience of inequality in the eye of the law 
for which the English Constitution has been celebrated by phi- 
losophers and statesmen, flourished more than six centuries 
ago in primaeval vigor in the emancipated communes of Feudal 
France. 

Secondly. Originally, at least, every bourgeois was a rotu- 
rier ; that is, he was neither a noble nor a clergyman. The 
members of those orders were excluded from the bourgeoisie, 
because they had rights to assert in the bourg, and duties to 
perform there, which were regarded as incompatible with the 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 123 

rights and the duties of honrgeois. Many proofs might, how- 
ever, he adduced, ^o show that this rule was soon and often re- 
laxed ; that nobles frequently acquired and exercised the bour- 
geoisie ; and that the clerical office was no elTeotual impedi- 
ment in any case m which a clerk in holy orders happened to 
possess, within a bourg, property holden, not in righ't of his 
church, but in his own personal capacity. 

Thirdly. Criminals, also, and the king's enemies, and the 
enemies of the bourg, were disqualified from becoming bour- 
geois. The same rule originally applied to persons not born 
in wedlock, and to leprous persons, and to their descondants. 
But the disappearance of the leprosy from Europe, and the le- 
gitimation of bastards, abolished, m process of time, each of 
these latter grounds of incompetency. 

Fourthly. The bourgeoisie might be acquired by birth, by 
marriage, or by prescription. Thus the children, or the wife, 
or the husband of a bourgeois were themselves bourgeois. A 
continued residence in a bourg for a year and a day conferred 
the same advantage. The bourgeoisie in any city might also 
be acquired by a special grant from the king in favor of any per- 
son who, in virtue of it, became what was called Bourgeois du 
Roi or du Royaume. This concession was usually purchased 
with money. It bound the grantee to a residence in the bourg 
during a few days, at one of the greater festivals of the Church, 
unless he should obtain a dispensation. It required him to pay 
a rate or tax from which the other bourgeois of the town were 
exempt, and either to buy or to build within its precincts a 
house of a certain prescribed value, which was to serve as a 
security for the payment of that impost. 

^Mien this personal right of bourgeoisie had been once firmly 
established, it became the subject of a most lucrative royal 
patronage. By means of it, a vassal, though contmuing to live 
on the lands of his lord, might rescue himself from subjection 
to his lord's authority, because, between a bourgeois du roi and 
the king, there could be no intermediate seigneur. After the 
reunion of the province of Champagne to the royal domain, in 
the year 1285, these invasions of the crown on the property 
and powers of the lords rapidly increased. The privilege of 
becoming a bourgeois du roi then began to be asserted and ad- 
mitted in favor of any vassal, on the simple condition of his 



124 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

disclaiming subjection to his seigneur, and doing fealty and 
homage to the supreme suzerain. In 1372, Charles Y. formal- 
ly declared that to impart to any one the right of bourgeoisie 
was the exclusive and inalienable prerogative of the crown. 

Such having been, in general, the methods by which the 
bourgeoisie might be acquired, we are next to consider, What 
were the privileges which it conferred ? 

First, then, the bourgeois of a French bourg could not be 
taxed, without their own consent, beyond a certain maximum, 
the amount of which was ascertained by the charter of the 
place. Those charters usually provided for the commutation 
of tributes in kind for fixed money payments. On the same 
terms the oorvees were abolished in the bourgs, and there also 
quit rents were substituted for those feudal dues, which were 
elsewhere exigible, on so many occasions, for the benefit of the 
lord. The bourgeois were farther exempt from the obligation 
of finding lodging and purveyance for the king, or for any of 
his ofiioers or feudatories, and from many other vexatious bur- 
dens to which the ignoble vassals of a rural fief were liable. 

Secondly. When extraordinary imposts were to be raised 
within a bourg for the service of the suzerain, the bourg claim- 
ed and exercised the right of granting or of withholding such 
supplies at its pleasure. 

Thirdly. To every bourg was conceded, to some extent, and 
to most bourgs to a very great extent, the right of self-govern- 
ment. It was a right which, in all legislative and administra- 
tive affairs, was exercised by a mayor and aldermen (echevins), 
and in all judicial affairs by judges freely chosen by the bour- 
geois themselves. The bourgeois having succeeded to the leg- 
islative powers of the seigneur and his feudal court, made by- 
laws ; and, having succeeded to his judicial powers, they elect- 
ed magistrates for the effective enforcement of them. This 
great burgher franchise of self-government was, in fact, as I 
have already observed with reference to the communes, the use 
and improvement by the local democracy, for democratic pur- 
poses, of the powers which had formerly been enjoyed and 
abused by the local despotism for despotic purposes. By shift- 
ing hands, the sceptre was converted into an segis. Freedom 
was rendered secure by the acquisition of the very same instru- 
ment whixsh had before rendered tyranny formidable. 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 125 

You will, however, understand that the perfect freedom of 
this elective franchise was peculiar to the communes ; and 
that, as the three forms of municipal government were progress- 
ively drawn into correspondence and harmony with each oth- 
er, it gave place, even in the communes, to a more restricted 
system. The choice of the people and the nomination of the 
crown were then, hy various compromises, combined and rec- 
onciled with each other. Thus, in some bourgs, each Quar- 
tier voted a list of eligible candidates, and from those lists the 
royal officer or Prevot made his choice of the corporate officers. 
In other bourgs, again, one half of the governing body were 
freely chosen by the bourgeois, the other half being appointed 
by the kmg. In many the people chose, not the municipal of- 
ficers themselves, but electors, by whom they were to be nom- 
inated. Recourse was had in some instances to the lot, to de- 
cide between the various selected candidates ; or the number 
of the voters was reduced by requiring peculiar and high qual- 
ifications. Ultimately, indeed, the electoral franchise of the 
bourgeois was reduced to insignificance throughout the whole 
of France ; but, during the period of which I now speak, that 
is, from the time of Philippe Auguste to the end of the fifteenth 
century, it existed in nearly all the bourgs in more or less vi- 
tality, and under more or less restraint from these or similar 
interventions of the royal authority. 

Fourthly. The Penal Law, established in the bourgs by 
their charters, was in many respects more lenient and more 
wise than the corresponding law as it prevailed in the kingdom 
at large. Thus, for example, the liablity to damages was sub- 
stituted for the Lex Talionis, the trial by battle was abolished, 
and capital sentences in a bourg did not involve the confisca- 
tion of the estate and goods of the offender. 

Fifthly. The bourgeois enjoyed the protection of a local 
police long before the establishment of any such institution in 
the kingdom at large. They had open fairs and markets to 
which all traders resorted, under the protection of the king, 
and the members of every trade were associated in separate 
guilds for their mutual defense, and (as it was then believed) 
for their mutual benefit, and for the improvement of their re- 
spective crafts. 

Sixthly. Among the ordinary, though not the invariable 



126 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

privileges of a tourg, Avere the riglit of fortifying and defend- 
ing the town; the right of excluding from its precincts any 
money of new weight and value, even though struck at the 
royal mint ; and the right of having an hotel de ville, a helfry, 
a town clerk, and a common seal. 

These municipal privileges were not, however, unconditional. 
The citizens hought their franchises at a price. It remains, 
therefore, to inquire, however briefly. What were the obliga- 
tions to which the privileged bourgs were generally subject ? 

First, then, the bourgeois were bound to guard the town 
walls, to maintain the fortifications, to keep the public places 
and thoroughfares in good order, to keep watch and ward in 
the streets, and to provide for all the duties and expenses of 
the local police. 

Secondly. They were required to raise funds to meet all 
civil expenditure. 

Thirdly. They were bound, sometimes in direct terms, and 
sometimes indirectly, to pay to the king a periodical tribute, 
which was, in fact, the price of the liberties for which they 
were indebted to him. 

Fourthly. They were originally required to serve the king 
in his wars during some definite period, with some prescribed 
number of men-at-arms ; for the bourgeois, when considered 
as seigneurs of the urban fief, were, like all other seigneurs, 
bound to render to the king military services. But the con- 
tinuance and other conditions of that service were very dis- 
similar in different bourgs, and at length this obligation was 
commuted almost in them all for money payments ; for the 
civic militia of course fell into disesteem as soon as the use of 
well-disciplined and regular armies had been introduced and 
firmly established. 

I may thus far seem to have been forgetful of the question 
which I proposed at the commencement of this lecture — ^the 
question, that is. In what manner the French municipalities 
contributed to conduct France from the state of a Feudal Con- 
federation to that of an absolute Monarchy ? Whatever I have 
hitherto said rpust, however, be considered as preparatory, and 
as subservient to the answer to that inquiry. It is, indeed, a 
very brief and imperfect introduction, but may perhaps be suf- 
ficient to render the following solution of it intelligible. 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 127 

First, then, in proportion as the hourgs obtained the transfer 
of the seignorial power from the feudal lords to the bourgeois 
collectively, they narrowed the range of that power, and im- 
paired its energy. "When fiefs so numerous and so consider- 
able had passed from the territorial aristocracy to the civic 
democracy, the external form of that despotic system ceased 
to be animated by its primitive and livmg spirit. Until then 
the population of France had been composed of two great an- 
tagonistic powers — ^the nobles and the roturiers ; the one en- 
joying all the privileges of freedom, and the other sustaining 
all the burdens of servitude. But when at length the bour- 
geois were interposed between the two as a mediating body, 
combining in their own persons the rights and obligations of 
each, they at once mitigated the sternness of the dominant 
authority and the sufferings of the subject multitude. 

Secondly. Each bourg formed a species of independent 
commonwealth within the realm ; and such commonwealths, 
when extended throughout the whole compass of it, acted 
every where as germs from which the national government 
was to derive its growi^h, or as molds by which it was to re- 
ceive its future form and character. As the monarchs of 
France at first nourished and defended the privileges of the 
free cities, so the free cities at length contributed to mature 
and to develop the absolute sovereignty of those monarchs. 

Thirdly. Though the municipalities enervated the spirit, 
and undermined the strength of the feudal confederation, they 
were too widely dispersed, too little connected with each other, 
and too unwarlike to enter into any direct conflict with it. 
They could wage such a war successfully only from beneath 
the shield of the indefinite, but constantly increasing prerog- 
ative of the king. In that contest they found in him an 
effective protector, and he in them effective subjects, who 
rendered to him a regular revenue, an undivided allegiance, 
and the services of a militia which, if not very formidable, 
was at least numerous, and exempt from the control of scig- 
norial arrogance and caprice. 

Fourthly. The bourgs extended their own anti-feudal spirit 
and policy to the rural populations in their respective vicin- 
ities. Not only towns, but villages, and sometimes groups of 
villages, imitated the revolts of the greater communes, and 



128 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 

acquired the communal francliises. When such villages did 
not aheady exist in the vicinity of a great agricultural fief, it 
became customary for the king to encourage and to authorize 
the erection of them, in order that, when converted into hourgs, 
they might serve as an asylum to ignohle vassals disaffected 
to their lords. Hence arose those Yilleneuves, or Yilleneuves 
le E-oi, which are to he met in every part of modern France, 
and which, in their origin, were so many additions made to the 
royal at the expense of the seignorial resources. 

Fifthly. In the immediate presence of the political liber- 
ties enjoyed in these rural bourgs, personal slavery was daily 
felt as a more oppressive and hateful burden, and therefore 
daily advanced with a swifter pace to its complete and final 
dissolution. To afford the amplest scope for the gratification 
of this just and still increasing resentment, each municipality 
adopted and propagated those legal doctrines, to which I have 
aheady referred, respecting the personal freedom of every bour- 
geois, and respecting the right of every slave within its walls 
to a prompt and easy enfranchisement. Each bourg in France 
thus became a city of refuge for the serfs in its vicinity. 

Sixthly. Even yet more fatal to the predominance of the 
seignorial power was the legal fiction which extended the 
Bourgeoisie to the Bourgeois du Roi, that is, to free men not 
really inhabiting any bourg. In this class of bourgeois, free- 
dom (that is, the substitution of the character of a subject to 
the crown for the character of a vassal to a lord) first exhib- 
ited itself, not as a local, but as a personal privilege. It was 
a change which introduced, not merely a new status of soci- 
ety into France, but also a new and prolific idea into the 
minds of Frenchmen. The Bourgeois du Roi were the first 
persons in that kingdom who, in the full and proper sense of 
the term, became members of the Tiers Etat. 

Seventhly. The municipalities established throughout 
France, slowly indeed and imperfectly, but yet surely, that 
aristocracy of commerce, which is every where the inveterate 
and the fatal enemy of the aristocracy of hereditary descent 
and territorial possessors. In all the greater bourgs, and un- 
der the shelter of their peculiar privileges, labor and capital 
each began to be employed in those methods, and to be dis- 
tributed according to those principles, by which each is ren- 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 129 

dered most effective as an instrument of reproduction. Wealth 
increased, and industry, and security ; and, in many of the 
most important offices of life, the townsmen were thus daily 
taught to feel their individual worth and their collective 
power. 

Eighthly. The feudal dominion rested chiefly on unwrit- 
ten or traditional customs, of which the court or parliament 
of the seigneur were the judicial expositors. The municipal- 
ities, on the contrary, were governed to a great extent by the 
Droit ccrit, and the gradual dominion of the written over the 
unwritten law was alternately the cause and the effect of a 
corresponding subordination of the seignorial to the municipal 
authority. 

The Droit ecrit was established in the bourgs in several 
methods. For, first, the charters or royal grants invariably 
ascertained what were the customs to which the bourg was to 
be subject, and under which the inhabitants of it were to live. 
They were, in general, the ancient customs of the place, or of 
the immediate vicinage ; and these customs were recited in 
the charters with more or less of copiousness, to exclude, as 
far as possible, the arbitrary exercise of that judicial discretion, 
which is more or less inevitable when the judges have at once 
to declare and to enforce rules, not expressly prescribed by the 
Legislature, but gathered from the recorded usages or decisions 
of their predecessors. 

In each municipality, also, the written code was, from year 
to year, rendered at once more copious and more precise by 
the promulgation of those by-laws which each was authorized 
to establish. Such by-laws echoed and reflected the spirit of 
the institutions which gave them birth. They had, for their 
basis, natural equity, especially in whatever related to the 
various relations of domestic life, and to the acquisition, alien- 
ation, and descent of property. 

And, as the cities of France originally caught from those of 
Tuscany and Lombardy the spirit of municipal independence, 
so they derived from the same source the study and the ad- 
miration of the ancient Roman jurisprudence. It was quoted, 
followed, and adopted in many of the more considerable bourgs, 
and especially in the South. It supplied the judges who ad- 
ministered, and the lawyers who commented on it, m those 

I 



130 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

]ocal tribunals, with principles and witli analogies drawn from 
the imperial constitution ; and, therefore, hostile to the pre- 
tensions of the seigneurs, and favorable to those of the mon- 
archs of France. From one end of the kingdom to the other, 
it thus became more or less recognized (according to the dis- 
tinction of the French lawyers), either as the Droit ecr it, or 
as the Raison ecrite. It was recognized as the Droit ecrit in 
those places where the Roman law had till then prevailed as 
a traditionary local custom. It was recognized as the Raison 
ecrite in those places where hereditary traditions, and the re- 
mains of the barbaric codes, had more or less superseded the 
old Roman jurisprudence. Thus either the corpi&s juris civilis, 
or the coustumiers or local codes as illustrated by it, gradually 
overspread every municipality of the kingdom, subverting in 
their progress no inconsiderable part of the feudal maxims and 
institutions. 

To these various causes is chiefly, though not exclusively, 
to be attributed the victory of the municipal over the feudal 
system of France, and the appearance of that great element of 
French society which we call Tiers Etat. It was the imme- 
diate offspring of the Bourgeoisie— understanding that word as 
expressive, not of the right of citizenship, but of the whole 
mass of the French people, among whom that right was dif- 
fused ; and, therefore, as comprising the bourgeois of all the 
old Roman municipia, of the Prevotal cities, of the communes, 
and of the villages possessing the communal franchise, and add- 
ing to these the Bourgeois du Roi or du Royaume. When we 
reflect on the inherent energy of this member of the social 
economy of France, we are tempted to wonder rather that its 
strength was so long dormant, than that it at length awoke 
with such terrific vitality. The explanation of their prolong- 
ed inaction is, however, neither obscure nor difficult. As the 
bourgs defeated the seignorial dominion in favor of the mo- 
narchical power, so were they themselves destined to yield to 
the power which they had so largely contributed to elevate. 
The principal causes of this vicissitude of fortune were, I 
think, as follows : 

First. The Bourg became a petty and democratic repub- 
lic in the centre of a vast and absolute monarchy. The spirit 
of the one was antagonistic to the spirit of the other. Laws 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 131 

as immutable as the nature of man and of human society de- 
creed that this inherent hostility should at last ripen into a 
mortal conflict. To that conflict the royal power advanced 
with overwhelming advantages. 

For, secondly, when the Bourg had succeeded in wresting 
from the lord his seigneurie, the Bourg itself, as I have before 
remarked, became, by that very act, a seigneur. The feudal 
rights, and with them the feudal obligations of the lord, were 
not extinguished, but were transferred to the Bourgeois. Now 
those obligations were numerous, and burdensome, and indef- 
inite. In every contest between the commune and the king, 
he successfully asserted his privileges as their suzerain, and 
they inevitably acknowledged their liabilities as his vassals. 
The privileges were continually extended — the Jiabilities as 
continually increased. 

Thirdly. The burden of military service pressed on the 
bourgs with extreme severity at all times ; but during the 
wars between the kings of France and England, those burdens 
became so oppressive, that, in many cases, the cities surren- 
dered their charters and franchises, in order to escape so in- 
tolerable a liability. This took place, for example, at E,oye 
in 1373, and in Neuville le Roi in 1370. 

Fourthly. ' When the Parliaments of France, and especially 
that of Paris (as I shall hereafter have occasion to explain), 
acquired a supreme jurisdiction over all civil and penal caus- 
es, they employed it in subverting or undermining every mu- 
nicipal privilege which was opposed to the royal will, or which 
abridged the royal authority. For those Parliaments were 
originally composed of nominees and dependents of the king, 
who usually employed all their judicial astuteness in promot- 
ing what they regarded as his interest ; except, indeed, when 
the prerogatives of the crown came into competition with their 
own powers, dignity, and emoluments. 

Fifthly. In the exercise of their judicial power, the Parlia- 
ments established it as a principle of law that municipal char- 
ters were revocable at the royal pleasure — a principle which 
was not announced as a mere barren doctrine, but which was 
continually reduced to practice, as often as any municipality 
provoked the displeasure or jealousy of the sovereign. 

Sixthly. By assisting the king to annihilate the seignorial 



132 THE AN TI -FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

or aristocratic power, the "bourgs had deprived themselves of 
any alliances in their future contentions v^ith him. The 
Bourgeois were thenceforward hrouoht into a direct and un- 
aided collision with the power of the crown, enhanced as that 
power was hy the adhesion to it of that new nobility, which 
had taken the place of the ancient feudal seigneurs. 

Seventhly. The hourgs were isolated bodies, whom the 
king could attack and conquer in detail — not confederate bod- 
ies, like the great Italian cities, or the Hanse Towns in the 
north of G-ermany. The strength of the king consisted in the 
concentration of his resources ; the weakness of the bourgs, in 
the wide dispersion and incoherence of the powers which they 
separately possessed. 

Eighthly. In the contest with their sovereign, the French 
cities did not possess the advantage which, in that age, was 
enjoyed by the greater cities in Spain, Italy, G-ermany, and 
England — the advantage of commercial wealth and enterprise. 
There was not a single mercantile city in France which could 
have competed, in wealth, in manufactures, or in navigation, 
with Barcelona, Genoa, Venice, Bremen, Norwich, or Bristol. 
They could not oppose the power of the purse to the power of 
the sword. 

Ninthly. But, of all the causes of their weakness and of 
their fall, the most important was, that their functions and 
powers were exclusively municipal, and were not at all polit- 
ical. At Florence, and Pisa, and in the other Italian repub- 
lics, the government of the commonwealth was inseparable 
from the government of the corporation. Those municipali- 
ties waged war and made treaties with foreign states, and ren- 
dered to their nominal suzerain little more than a formal hom- 
age. The incorporated municipalities of England have, from 
the earliest times, assumed a large share in the political gov- 
ernment of the kingdom, and, as early as the reign of Henry 
III,, appeared by their representatives in the House of Com- 
mons. Their local rights were from the first regarded as in- 
separably connected with the national liberties, and, in the 
strength of their confederacy with the nobles and the people 
at large, they have ever maintained their own corporate fran- 
chises. Such, also, was the condition of all the municipali- 
ties which enjoyed the freedom of the city under the Roman 



THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 133 

Republic. But it was otherwise in France. The subversion 
of the privileges of any particular French bourg did not appear 
to violate the rights of any of the constituted authorities be- 
yond the walls of the city itself, and was, therefore, not resent- 
ed as an injury to society at large. 

Tenthly. These privileges were, therefore, one after anoth- 
er, overthrown by acts of the royal authority, which, though 
sometimes resisted, and especially by the city of Paris, result- 
ed at length in a complete, though progressive social revolu- 
tion. The detail of those acts belongs rather to the provincial 
than to the general history of France. I will attempt nothing 
more than to indicate some few of the more considerable steps 
of this retrograde movement. 

The financial independence of the municipalities was the 
earliest object of attack. Their revenues were chiefly derived 
from tolls, from fines and forfeitures, from the octrois, and oc- 
casionally from tallies. Saint Louis and his successors forbade 
the imposition of octrois or of failles without their own previ- 
ous and express license. The same condition was subsequent- 
ly imposed upon the resort to every other extraordinary meas- 
ure by which the wants of the local treasuries could be sup- 
plied. When, to escape these restrictions, the bourgs borrowed 
money, the king again interposed to fix the time and the other 
conditions of the repayment of their debts. Sometimes he pro- 
vided for the increase of the local ways and means by himself 
raising the scale of some existing impost ; and sometimes he 
made orders for retrenching what he considered as a useless or 
an improvident expenditure. 

These were, however, isolated measures. Their operation 
was limited to any particular placo or places which seemed to 
the monarch to stand peculiarly in need of his superintending 
care. But, in the sixteenth century, this royal authority was 
exercised on a more comprehensive scale. Ordinances then 
appeared, dimmishing the number and abridging the freedom 
of the members both of the constituent and of the elective mu- 
nicipal colleges. Those ordinances ascertained and enlarged 
the powers of the king over the finances of the bourgs, over the 
choice of their public functionaries, and over their administra- 
tive conduct in the discharge of their several functions. 

In pursuance of those laws, and in the exercise of those ab- 



134 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

solute and unlimited prerogatives with, wliicli he considered 
himself invested, Louis XIY. assumed the patronage of the 
various offices in the bourgs of France, which had till then 
heen always filled up by popular elections, and sold his nomi- 
nation of them to the highest bidder. To augment the number 
and the productiveness of such sales, he created many new 
civic offices, which were to be hold en either in alternate years, 
or biennially, or for life, or as inheritances transmissible to the 
male heirs of the purchasers. 

After these and similar invasions of the financial and official 
independence of the municipalities, the kings of France next 
made war on their judicial privileges. The Ordonnances of 
Orleans, of Moulins, of Blois, and of St. Maur, were success- 
ively passed for this, arriong other purposes, between 1561 and 
1580 ; and, within that brief space of nineteen years, those 
enactments successively despoiled the civic tribunals of their 
jurisdiction, first in all commercial causes, then in all civil 
suits, and, lastly, in all cases of crime. Their competency 
was thus narrowed within the limits which circumscribe the 
powers of a magistrate of police, or of a court of requests ; 
and even in those questions of police which immediately con- 
cern the health and the beauty of towns, the central power 
superseded the local authority in many essential respects ; as, 
for example, by prescribing general rules to be observed in all 
bourgs as to the laying out of streets and the mode of building 
houses, and by appointing royal officers to superintend the 
sewers, the public thoroughfares, the markets, the weights, 
and the measures. 

The general principle regulating the relations between the 
royal government and the privileged cities of France thus came 
at length to be, that they were to be regarded as in a perpet- 
ual pupilage, and the king as their guardian. Thus they were 
forbidden either to alienate or to mortgage their property with- 
out his license. To detect their past extravagance, they were 
required to send to the Royal Intendants of their respective 
provinces accounts of their receipts and expenditure during the 
ten years preceding the year 1669. To prevent their future 
waste, Louis XIY., in 1673, required that they should annually 
lay before the intendants, for then" previous sanction, budgets 
of their exuected income and of their intended outlay for the 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 135 

ensuing twelve months ; and tlie intendants were not at lib- 
erty to give that sanction without the express license of the 
royal council, if in any case the contemplated outgoings of the 
year should exceed a certain maximum, which was fixed for 
the annual expenditure of every such city. 

Thus, one hy one, all the powers of the municipalities were 
extinguished, with the exception only of such as afforded to 
the Bourgeois no exercise for ability, and no stimulus to am- 
bition. From the position of independent commonwealths they 
had fallen to the state of parochial vestries. Originally they 
had enjoyed privileges which menaced the breaking up of 
France into a multitude of petty urban oligarchies, and which 
were actually fatal to the rural oligarchies of feudalism. Ul- 
timately those privileges were destroyed by the monarchical 
ally with whom they had conducted their long and successful 
struggle against the seigneurs. They were then absorbed in 
the great and progressive centralization of all political power 
in France. During more than a century they remained help- 
less and impotent within its grasp ; the least dreaded, but not 
the least formidable, of those springs the rebound of which 
was at length to rend asunder, with such terrific violence, the 
bands by which they had all so long been comnressed. 



LECTURE VL 

ON THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 

When Peter the Venerable proclaimed to indignant multi- 
tudes the profanations of the city of the Grreat King — and 
when St. Bernard announced to breathless crowds that " the 
Lord stood in need of their aid" (such were his own words), 
''or, rather, feigned to stand in need of it, that he might ap- 
pear, in their defense," " graciously willing to become their 
debtor, that so he might bestow pardon of sin and eternal life 
on them who should fight manfully in his cause" — both the 
impassioned hermit and the half-inspired saint were giving 
utterance to fears and to resentments by which the Clii-istian 
world had been agitated during the six preceding centuries, 



136 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

for SO lon£' liad tlie dominion of the Mussulmans been attain- 
ing to its full growth and development. Though not without 
many vicissitudes, they had, throughout that long period, been 
still, on the whole, advancing. They had possessed themselves 
of Syria ; they had subdued Egypt, and the Eoman province 
of Africa ; they had conquered Spain, and all the islands of the 
Mediterranean ; they had ravaged the coasts of Italy ; they 
had invaded France ; and, notwithstanding the victories of 
Charles Martel and his successors, they had effected a settle- 
ment in Septimania ; and now they were menacing the safety 
of Constantinople, the great outwork and rampart of Western 
Europe. To the statesmen of that age the farther progress of 
the Saracenic arms must have appeared as the most formida- 
ble of all dangers. To the great body of the people, the indig- 
nities offered by the Saracens to the Holy Sepulchre and to the 
pilgrims resorting thither, must have appeared the most re- 
volting of all injuries. The enthusiastic many were then, of 
course, as at all other times, the unconscious instruments of 
the politic few. But it is not less a matter of course that the 
politic few became, in turn, the victims of their own spells, 
and themselves at length imbibed the passions which they 
excited. 

Nothing is more easy than to detect the worldly motives 
which impelled the ruder population of the Western world to 
roll in eight successive and desolating torrents toward the 
shores of Africa and the East. The Crusader received a plen- 
ary indulgence, that is, the remission of all the penances by 
which, as he believed, his sins must otherwise have been ex- 
piated, either in the present life or in purgatory. During his 
absence, the Church became the protector of his wife, his 
children, and his estate. Whoever might injure them was 
declared excommunicate, ipso facto, and without any farther 
sentence. His debts ceased to bear interest from the day of 
his departure, even though he had bound himself by an oath 
to the payment of them. He was authorized to postpone, till 
the lapse of three years, the full payment of any debt which 
was then actually due. If his estate had been mortgaged, he 
was entitled to receive the whole produce of it, during the first 
year of his crusade, without any deduction for the benefit of 
his creditor. He was exempted from the payment of any 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 137 

taille which might he imposed on his lands during his ah- 
sence ; and, finally, he might insist on receiving from his 
parents a tenth of their income for his own support. 

Strong inducements these to a dissolute and necessitous 
multitude to ahandon their homes for the excitements of an 
unknown, and, as it was supposed, a lucrative warfare. But 
it would he a libel on our common nature to ascrihe to such 
causes alone, or chiefly, a movement which, during 'one hund- 
red and fifty successive years, agitated every state and al- 
most every family in Christendom. The dark mysteries of 
our existence, though little heeded in our own luxurious and 
mechanical age, pressed heavily on the spirits of those who 
lived beneath the tyranny and gloom of the feudal domination. 
In their struggle with those inscrutable enigmas of our mortal 
being, they yielded up then* minds to a long succession of su- 
perstitious terrors, and the legends of those ages abound with 
prodigies far more strange than those with which Livy has 
made us familiar. Men were gazing anxiously on the stars, 
which were ready to fall and crush this antiquated globe. 
They saw on their own bodies the mhaculous impression of 
the holy cross. Nuns and hermits, returning from their cells, 
alarmed the world with fearful anticipations. The saints, 
quitting their celestial abodes, reappeared on earth, to dis- 
close to trembling man the awful behests of his Creator. 
Throughout the whole of Eastern Europe, Flagellants exhib- 
ited to admiring crowds their self-lacerated bodies. Yast mul- 
titudes of children assembled together, not for childish sports, 
but to pursue what they imagined to be the way to Jerusalem. 
Nay, Innocent III. himself announced, in a papal bull, that 
little more than sixty were yet to elapse of the six hundred and 
sixty-six years which the Apocalypse had assigned as the limit 
of the reign of Mohammed, ^n was an age in which all might 
observe, though perhaps but few could interpret those heav- 
ings and swellings of the popular mind wliich invariably indi- 
cate the approach of some great innovation in human affairs. 

"When, therefore, enraptured voices summoned the Western 
world to throw its accumulated forces on the followers of the 
False Prophet, they sounded to an incalculable host of listen- 
ers but as the audible expression of those vehement but in- 
definite emotions under which their own bosoms were already 



138 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 

laboring. That summons was re-eolioed from one extremity 
of the European continent to the other. Monks exchanged 
their cowls for coats of mail. Aged men pressed onward in 
the hope of at least laying their hones in the Holy City. At the 
head of several ladies of high degree, the Countesses of Flanders 
and of Blois, and a daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, joined 
the sacred armament. Each prince, as he assumed the cross, 
found himself at the head of hands of devoted followers. 
' There were not, indeed, wanting jesters in those days to enjoy 
the comedy, nor thrifty men to grow rich in the market thrown 
open to them by this strange excitement ; hut in the words of 
an eye-witness, " ii plerumque quos nulla adhuc eundi volun- 
tas attigerat, dum hodie, super omnimoda aliorum venditione 
cachinnant, dum eos misere ituros, miseriusque redituros af- 
firmant, in crastinum, repentino instinctu, pro paucis num- 
mulis sua tota tradentes, cum eis proficisehantur quos riser- 
ant." So ardent and so universal was this enthusiasm, that 
Anna Comnena declares that it would have been easier to 
reckon the leaves of the forest, the sands of the sea, or the stars 
of the firmament, than to count the Crusaders who rolled in 
interminable waves toward the shores of the Bosporus. 

In more measured terms it may be stated, that, in the ear- 
liest of these expeditions, the Crusaders might have been cal- 
culated by millions, and very far exceeded the number of the 
followers of Xerxes, or any other invading army of which 
either the Western or the Eastern world retains an authentic 
tradition. 

From the mysterious, the romantic, and the picturesque 
aspect of this passage in the history of mankind, we must, 
however, pass to investigate (as far as our time will allow) 
what was the effect of the Crusades in depressing the Feudal 
and elevating the Monarchical power in France. And, with a 
view to perspicuity (of all objects the most important in dis- 
cussions of this nature), I will arrange the remarks I have to 
offer on that subject under twelve different heads, hoping that 
I may thus escape the confusion incident to the immediate 
juxtaposition of many topics, which are connected with each 
other by no logical sequence or natural arrangement, and may 
so be able to diminish the demand I must otherwise have 
m.ade on your attention now and your recollection hereafter. 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES, 139 

First, then, I will advert to the tendency of the Crusades to 
abridge the feudal power hy diminishing the number of the 
serfs attached to the various seigneuries in France. 

Slavery and feudality were inseparable concomitants. The 
wealth of a seigneur was composed of two elements, the land, 
and the laborers who cultivated the land ; or, rather, his capi- 
tal may be said to have consisted almost wholly in the com- 
mand of compulsory and ill-requited labor, for land was then 
of little exchangeable value ; whereas labor was deficient and 
of high price. According, therefore, to what may be received 
as a universal law, the spontaneous manumission of the feudal 
slaves was at that time impossible. It could be accomplished 
only by the intervention and the constraint of some external 
and superior power. 

Feudal slavery was, however, mild and gentle in France, 
when compared with the state of slavery in ancient Rome, or 
in the European settlements in America. The French feudal 
slave was for the most part prsedial, and attached to the soil ; 
or, as our own law expresses it, was a villain regardant. There, 
indeed, he was bound to live and to labor throughout his whole 
life. But in many oases he was, in some sense of the word, 
the owner of the land on which he wrought. He rendered to 
the lord a stipulated rent in money or in kind ; and though 
the property was continually liable to forfeiture by escheats, 
and could not be either abandoned or alienated by the serf 
without the lord's consent, yet, on the whole, the servile con- 
dition of such cultivators bore a much stronger resemblance to 
that of the present serfs in Russia, or to that of the ryots in 
Hindostan, than to that of a modern slave in Alabama or in 
Brazil. 

The legal impediments to the manumission of the French 
serf were, however, many and formidable. An ecclesiastical 
seigneur was unable to enfranchise his serf, because such an 
act would have alienated a part of the property of the Church, 
which the canon law declared to be inalienable. A lay seign- 
eur was unable to enfranchise the serf without the concurrence 
of each in turn of the various other lords, who, in the long 
chain of feudal dependence, might have an interest, mediate 
or immediate, or more or less remote, in the fief to which tho 
serf belonged. 



140 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

But the Crusades introduced, if not a new law, yet at least 
a new custom of enfranchisement. According to the Eoman, 
and perhaps every other code, the military character was in- 
compatible with the servile condition ; especially it was so in 
the case of one whom they called Miles Dei. If, then, the 
serf could join the standard of a Crusader, and himself assume 
the Cross, he became free. No positive law, indeed, forbade 
the lord to reclaim him ; but the universal sentiment of soci- 
ety was at once the source and the sanction of a tacit lav/ of 
that kind. 

To have withdrawn a soldier of the Cross from his high and 
holy calling, in order that he might resume his former menial 
employment, would have been to outrage the common feelings 
of mankind, and to provoke from them an insuperable resist- 
ance. Thus the murmurs of the seigneur, the legal objections 
of the canonists, and the claims of the suzerain, were all alike 
silenced by this military emancipation. 

The Droit d'Aubaine gave to the seigneur a right to the serv- 
ices of any vagrant found on his fief after the lapse of a year 
and a day, unless, within that period, the vagrant had ac- 
knowledged himself to be the serf of some other lord ; that is, 
the legal presumption in the case of all strangers was in favor 
of their slavery and against their freedom. But the effect of 
the Crusades was to reverse this presumption, and therefore to 
diminish the supply and the number of serfs ; for those wars 
threw the whole population of France into unwonted habits 
of change of place. When Crusaders were wandering over 
the whole surface of the kingdom, it became no longer possible 
to consider, and to deal with, all wanderers as presumably 
slaves. Such persons were thus permitted to answer the usual 
challenge to name their owner, by declaring themselves vas- 
sals of the king. But a vassal of the king was necessarily free. 

These new habits of locomotion also gave additional import- 
ance to another law, which eminently favored personal freedom. 
It was the law which presumed a valid title to liberty in any 
man who had passed a year and a day in any commune. The 
gates of such cities, as we have already had occasion to ob- 
serve, were always wide open to those who fled to them as 
places of refuge, for thus establishing or acquiring their free- 
dom. With the general dispersion of the people during the 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 141 

assemblage of the crusading armies, the number of such fugi- 
tives continually increased, and the roll of the citizens was 
thus constantly augmented at the expense of the seigneurs and 
their fiefs. 

Thus the Crusades tended indirectly to abridge the supply 
of rural labor, and to diminish the wealth and the power of 
the lords. They tended directly to the same end, because, to 
escape this otherwise inevitable loss, the lords voluntarily pro- 
moted the manumission of their bondsmen, and then allured 
them to remain on their estates, by assigning to them land to 
be holden on low and unalterable money rents. 

Secondly. The Crusades tended to increase the strength 
and the number of the communes, which (as I have shown in 
my last lecture) were the natural foes and inveterate antago- 
nists of the feudal power. 

The communes were the great emporiums of commercial 
enterprise and capital in France. Now the Crusades created 
an enormous and fictitious demand for such capital ; or, in 
other terms, they enhanced the value of money, and depressed 
the price of all other exchangeable commodities, to an extent 
never before or since known in the world. They therefore 
placed the Crusaders, who were every where anxious to raise 
money by the sale of what they possessed, at the mercy of the 
citizens, who alone had at their command the funds requisite 
for purchasing such possessions. Conceive of the effect, in 
that uncommercial age, of a simultaneous demand for money 
in every part of Europe, by tens of thousands of persons en- 
gaged in equipping themselves and their followers for the holy 
war. A well-filled purse could, at such a crisis, command 
bargains which the wildest imagination of the most unscru- 
pulous extortioner would in other times have regarded as fab- 
ulous. In the first volume of Robertson's History of Charles 
v., you will find many curious examples of this state of the 
money market during the two first Crusades. The Counts of 
Poix and of Hainault actually sold their sovereignties. Rich- 
ard I. put up to sale even the office of gi'and justiciary ; and 
is said to have declared that he would sell London itself if he 
could find a purchaser. Many of the French seigneurs reck- 
lessly alienated the only means of their future subsistence — 
their lands, houses, furniture, and castles ; and in the midst 



142 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

of this general ferment the oahn and wealthy Bourgeois made 
their purchases. They bought many things of the distressed 
hut enthusiastic warriors of the Cross, hut especially civic 
rights, which (as an author of that day declares) the seigneurs 
would at any other time have died rather than have conferred. 

But it was not merely by the science of the counting-house 
that these associated merchants at this period acquired or in- 
creased their corporate franchises. During the absence in Pal- 
estine of many a gallant knight, lawless encroachments on his 
seignorial privileges were in progress, and were gradually, but 
securely, ripening into indestructible liberties. The king will- 
ingly lent his aid and his authority to such usurpations ; for 
to multiply communes was to increase his own powers, be- 
cause in every commune he was the immediate and the only • 
seigneur. Royal letters patent were therefore easily obtained 
for the creation of them, when the seigneur was not at hand 
to resist the grant. Returning from the camp before Acre or 
Constantinople, he found, to his dismay, in tjie centre of his 
own feudal territories, a camp of another kind — an intrenched 
position over which the royal standard waved, and in which 
his own dominion was no longer acknowledged, but where 
many of those had taken refuge on whose allegiance and fidel- 
ity his station, rank, and fortunes were dependent. 

Thirdly. The Crusades tended to terminate those private 
wars by which the seigneurs asserted and maintained their 
powers. 

In those wars, the lords commanded not merely their feudal 
retainers, but bands who, like the Condottieri of Italy, followed 
any chief whose reputation allured and whose wealth could 
maintain them. When the military power of France was 
directed against the Eastern world, these bands swelled the 
trains of their former seignorial leaders. It is difficult to 
doubt that, when the French kings plunged with such seem- 1 
ing recklessness into the holy war, they really foresaw and 
designed this advantage to themselves and to their more peace- 
able subjects. No policy could be more obvious or more at- 
tractive than that of thus delivering France from the scourge | 
of private wars, and of the ferocious and undisciplined troops * 
by whose aid they were so often conducted. Sixty years be- 
fore the earliest Crusade, the Church had, with the same be- 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 143 

neficent purpose, proclaimed the Treve de Dieu. But the Cru- 
sades themselves promised a much more effectual remedy ; nor 
was that promise unfulfilled. In the words of an historian of 
that age, " Innumeris populis ac nationihus ad sumendam cru- 
cem commotis, repente sic totus pene oocidens siluit, ut non 
solum hella movere, sed et arma quempiam in publico portare, 
nefas haberetur." 

The same writer (Otto of Friesland) has a whole chapter 
on the various wars which -were composed by the expedition 
to Palestine. There may, perhaps, have been some tendency 
in that age to exaggerate the benefits of the Crusades ; but it 
is at least certain that, with the close of them, both the prac- 
tice and the right of undertaking private wars were brought 
to an end. In a future lecture, I propose to explain how such 
wars were finally prohibited by St. Louis, whose ordinances 
on that subject owed much of their vitality to the new modes 
of thought and action which the Crusades had nurtured. It 
was an innovation dictated by the piety and the humanity of 
that illustrious prince, but which tended strongly, though per- 
haps undesignedly, to destroy one of the powers which had 
made the seigneurs most formidable — to subordinate their au- 
thority to that of their sovereign — and to bring them under the 
wholesome control of public opinion. 

Fourthly. The Crusades contributed largely to restore the 
Roman law m France, and therefore to subvert the customs 
on which, as on its basis, the Feudal power rested. During 
many years after the reign of Theodosius, the code which bears 
his name was received and prevailed both in the G-reek and in 
the Latin empire. It was afterward superseded in the East 
by the code of Justinian ; in the West by the Barbaric codes, 
and especially by those of the Franks, the G-oths, and the Bur- 
gundians. But there always lingered deep traces of the Roman 
jurisprudence to the southward of the Loire. "When, there- 
fore, the Crusaders returned from Constantinople, and brought 
back with them the attachment and reverence which they had 
there acquired for the code of Justinian, they found in G-uienne, 
Languedoc, and Provence, a soil ready for the reception and 
nourishment of the seeds of this new jurisprudence. Bologna, 
indeed, enjoyed for a long time a species of monopoly of this 
kind of knowledge and instruction ; but it vspread progressively 



144 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

over France, and eventually stifled the grov^th. there of the le- 
gal maxims which, during three centuries, had maintained and 
consecrated that which may he termed the political code of 
Feudalism, 

Fifthly. The Crusades contrihuted directly to change the 
judicial institutions by which the law was administered, and 
so to favor the introduction of the laws of Rome. 

The courts of justice in that age in France, as I shall here- 
after have occasion to explain, were either royal, or seignorial, 
or communal. The court of the seigneur was holden by him- 
self, or by a judge of his appointment, assisted by the chief 
vassals, knights, and squires of the fief. But, during the Cru- 
sades, these courts fell into neglect or desuetude, partly be- 
cause the lord himself, and a large proportion of his vassals, 
were absent in the East, and partly because the Bourgeois, 
who, as has been shown, had become the purchasers of large 
numbers of the baronial fiefs, were always prompt to enlarge 
the communal at the expense of the feudal jurisdiction. In 
those populous and wealthy cities were usually to be found 
men of leisure and of studious habits — men well disposed to 
exalt the authority of the Roman law, favorable, as it was, to 
municipal privileges, and opposed, as it was, to the barbaric 
or feudal institutions — and men perhaps yet more disposed to 
advance the authority of a code which afforded such abundant 
exercise for the astuteness of the legal profession, and such am- 
ple scope for elevating the rank of its members and augment- 
ing their emoluments. The progress of our own tribunals in 
the work of covert, though real legislation ; la the enactment 
of laws under the form and pretext of interpreting law ; and 
in the usurpation of powers foreign to the original objects of 
their existence, will readily illustrate the mode in which the 
communal courts of France succeeded (to borrow one of our 
own legal phrases) in ousting the baronial courts from their 
traditionary and admitted functions. The motives in either 
case may not have been sublime ; but in each, the general re- 
sult was eminently beneficial. Westminster Hall did noti 
wage a more determined or more successful war against the| 
ecclesiastical judges, than was carried on by the communal' 
against the feudal jurisdiction in France. Eventually, in- 
deed, the royal courts subdued and superseded the conquerors 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES 145 

themselves ; and then, among other less momentous victories, 
they abolished the old feudal trial by wager of battle. Thus, 
Mobile the crusading seigneurs were erecting royal thrones at Je- 
rusalem and Cyprus, they were forfeiting the judicial thrones, 
which had long been the main buttress of their strength, both 
in Southern and Northern France. 

Sixthly. The Crusades were fatal in many oases to the 
maintenance of the ancient relations of the feudatories and the 
royal suzerains to each other. The numerous sales of fiefs by 
their owners to raise funds for the service of the holy war had 
frequently the effect of consolidating many such possessions 
in the same hands. Thus two or more smaller fiefs were in 
those times often thrown into one large fief; and yet, more 
often still, the numerous links of the chain which connected 
the actual possessor of the soil with the ultimate suzerain 
were annihilated. The wealthy commune, or the rich mer- 
chant, bought out, as we should say, the whole line of seign- 
eurs to whom fealty and homage were successively due ; and 
the king became the immediate and the only suzerain of lands 
to which his title had before been far more remote and im- 
perfect. 

Till the Crusades it was an established principle of the feu- 
dal law, that no roturier could acquire or hold a fief. But the 
citizens of the Bourgs, who belonged to that class, were the 
only persons rich enough to purchase such properties. "What 
was then to be done to reconcile their absolute inability in 
point of law, with their exclusive ability in point of fact, to 
make such purchases ? Philippe Auguste solved this difficulty 
by a law, which declared that the royal investiture of any 
man with a fief raised him from the rank of a roturier to that 
of a noble. Thenceforward, therefore, the plebeian citizen, on 
buying such an estate, and on obtaining from the king the in- 
vestiture of it, became a patrician. No more deadly blow could 
have been aimed at one of the vital principles of Feudalism. 
The jurisdiction, the powers, and the dignities of a chieftain 
ceased to be the inalienable attributes of an hereditary caste. 
To the great scandal, no doubt, of many whose ancestral le- 
gends boasted of deeds done at Tours or at Roncesvalles, there 
appeared a new class of seigneurs. Goldsmiths perhaps, or 
Mercers, or even Vintners, who continued to live in the cities 

K 



146 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

where they had grown rich, preferring the profits of the ex 
change, or the pleasures of a civic banquet, to the unwonted 
solitude and the hazardous duties of a chatelain. 

Now the coincidence of these 'three circumstances — first, the 
consolidation of fi-efs ; secondly, the immediate approximation 
9f the king to the seigneur in possession as his only suzerain ; 
and, thirdly, the transfer of many such estates from military 
chieftains to mercantile men — tended at once to exalt the 
monarchical, and to depress the feudal authority. The king 
had less rivalry to encounter from his new feudatories. The 
new or commercial seigneur had less disposition to contend 
with his royal superior. An increased aggressive force was 
opposed to a diminished defensive resistance. 

Seventhly. The Crusades tended to impair the power of the 
feudal chiefs hy changing the whole military system of Europe. 
The structure of feudal armies was essentially defensive. 
They were unfit for foreign conquest, or for any prolonged or 
extended belligerent operations. As a general rule, a chief was 
entitled to the service of his retainers in the field only during 
forty successive days ; but, in the invasion of the Holy Land, 
it was impossible to adhere to this, or to any other definite 
limitation of time. The leaders of those expeditions, therefore, 
claimed and received the submission of their followers for pe- 
riods indeterminate, but far exceeding the extent of thek strict 
legal liability ; and in this, as in other cases, the unopposed 
encroachments of power gradually, though silently, ripened on 
the one side into the right to exact, and on the other side into 
the obligation to render, similar obedience in all future and 
analogous cases. 

Besides, to the safe conduct of so vast an enterprise, unity 
of command, strictness of discipline, and the prompt obedience 
of all inferior officers to the leader of the host, were so mani- 
festly indispensable, that not even the pride and the prejudices 
of the feudal lords who followed in the train of G-odfrey, or of 
Boniface of Montserrat, could withhold from those great cap- 
tains that supreme and absolute power. This practice of 
moving armed men in vast masses, and on distant enterprises, 
under the guidance of one all- controlling will, soon became 
habitual in all the states of Europe. It was, however, the 
very antithesis and contradiction to the feudal principle, which 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 147 

till tlien had been recognized in them all. That principle re- 
quired the division of all such forces under a body of military- 
aristocrats or oligarchs ; submitting, indeed, during a few 
weeks, to the same commander-in-chief, but rejecting, even 
during that brief period, the superiority in the field of any 
officer subordinate to him. When the object of European 
warfare ceased to be the conservation, and came to be the ac- 
quisition of power. Feudalism began to take its place among 
obsolete and antiquated institutions. 

Eighthly. That result was yet farther expedited by novel- 
ties which the Crusades introduced, not merely into the science 
of strategy, but also into the composition, the support, and 
the conveyance of armies ; for from the time of those expe- 
ditions may be dated the first appearance of the four great 
military departments, which have ever since been considered 
not less essential to the successful conduct of a war, than even 
the office of the general himself. A feudal force marched 
without a commissary to provide the requisite supplies of food 
and clothing ; or a quarter-master to superintend the execu- 
tion in detail of the movements which the leader had directed ; 
or an ordnance officer to furnish and conduct the necessary 
weapons and munitions of war ; or an engineer to baffle the 
natural or artificial obstacles which might impede the progress 
of the invading host. But when vast bodies of men were to 
march across distant territories, whether allied or unfriendly ; 
and still more, when they were to be embarked on long and 
remote voyages, then these parts of the mechanism or organ- 
ization of regular armies became evidently indispensable. 
Then, also, was first brought into use the function of the pro- 
vost-marshal, the executive officer by whom strict discipline 
is maintained, and who, whether on shipboard or ashore, su- 
perintends the military police. Now these innovations were 
not only incompatible with the belligerent system of the Feu- 
dal Dynasty, but were eventually destructive of that system ; 
for no one nation could ever return to those ruder arts of feu- 
dal warfare, when all nations had been taught these more 
comprehensive arrangements of a scientific campaign. 

Even yet more effective in the same direction was the 
change which the Crusades introduced in the comparative esti- 
mation in which horse and foot soldiers had till then been held. 



148 THE AKTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

You have only to open Monstrelet or Froissart to see with 
what contempt the feudal lords and then' favored followers re- 
garded that arm of the service which we now distinguifsh as 
the Infantry. The best titles they get from the aristocratic 
writers are those of Roturiers, Paysans, and even Brigands, to 
which are added a thick fire of contumelious, though to my- 
self unintelligible, nicknames. On the other hand, the seign- 
eurs, the nobles, the knights, and esquires, with their admir- 
ing chroniclers, bestrode well-bred and well-managed steeds, 
covered like themselves with coats of mail or chain armor ; 
and rode up and down the field like so many movable forts, 
against which the swords and missiles of the plebeian footmen 
were directed in vain. But when these gallant cavaliers were 
to embark for Acre or for Tunis, their horses proved most un- 
manageable encumbrances in the transports of those days. 
When they landed there, they had to encounter troops far better 
mounted than themselves, and still more expert in all equestrian 
exercises. But as often as they were constrained, by these and 
other causes, to quit the saddle, the knights and seigneurs found 
to their own surprise that, when drawn up on foot in line of bat- 
tle, they could resist the charge of the best appointed cavalry 
with a far greater steadiness and success than when fighting 
in what had at first seemed more advantageous terms. Thus, 
therefore, the infantry gradually rose in favor and considera- 
tion, and the Venetian Sanutus (an eye-witness and historian 
of some of those campaigns) is quoted by modern writers for 
tTie statement, that it had passed in his times into a maxim, 
that an army in the East ought to be composed of fifteen foot 
soldiers for every horseman. The quotation may perhaps be 
inaccurate (for I have not verified it) ; but it is at least cer- 
tain that the Crusades greatly abridged (though they did not 
annihilate) the wide chasm which till then had separated the 
rank of the mounted cavalier from that of the more humble 
Fantassin ; and that with the fall of this social distinction be- 
tween the two classes, fell also much of the political distinc- 
tion which had so long and so highly elevated the feudal seign- 
eur above the free men whom he held in vassalage and led 
to battle. 

Ninthly. I pass over without comment the effect of the Cru- 
sades in augmenting the wealth and power of the Papacy, and 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 149 

in calling into existence the new or Mendicant orders : the first, 
the head of all monarchical authority ; the second, the leaders 
of all democratic power in the then European world. A more 
convenient place for these topics will occur in the lecture which 
I hope hereafter to address to you. On the action and reaction 
of the Ecclesiastical and the Civil states in France on each 
other. For the present I confine myself to the remark, that 
monarchy in all its forms (and therefore in the papal form), 
and democracy in all its developments (and therefore in the 
Franciscan and Dominican developments), were the irreconcila- 
ble, and at length the triumphant, antagonists of that stern 
aristocracy which the feudal chieftains had maintained in 
France during three successive centuries. 

But, tenthly, the growth and the influence of the great mil- 
itary orders during the same era falls more immediately within 
the range of the inquiry in which we are at present engaged. 
Whatever may he the truth or the falsehood of the frightful 
imputations by which those orders were at length overwhelmed, 
it would he an idle prejudice to doubt that their original de- 
signs were noble, humane, and pious. When the Christian 
cavalier was about to abandon the home of his ancestors, and 
the scene of his own youthful sports and studies, for the de- 
fense or conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, he not seldom sum- 
moned to his aid all the profound hopes and recollections which 
kindle the self-devotion of the martyr and the zeal of the mis- 
sionary. He often began his perilous enterprise by passing 
through what he and others regarded as a religious and an aw- 
ful ceremonial. The bath in which the knight was plunged 
was suggestive of a retrospect to a far more sacred and mys- 
terious baptism. The white robes in which he was arrayed 
symbolized the personal purity to which he pledged his honor 
and his faith. The kiss which greeted his admission into an 
order of chivalry reminded him that he was a member of that 
Holy Church, in which an apostle had enjoined the observance 
of the same emblem of a spu'itual brotherhood. The society,, 
at once warlike and religious, into which he passed, was em- 
blematic of the Church Militant here on earth. Becoming a 
knight companion of St. John of Jerusalem, of the Templars, 
of the Teutonic Order, or of the Hospitallers, he was bound to 
do battle to the death against the Infidels — to combat the world 



150 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

also, and the flesh and the devil — to support the weak — to min- 
ister to the sick — and to protect the pilgrim. How well these 
vows were .sometimes performed is attested by the histories of 
Rhodes and of Malta. But for my immediate purpose it is 
more material to observe, that these devoted champions of the 
faith gave to the kings of France the command of a new and 
formidable militia ; a militia not dependent on the caprice or 
on the aids of his feudal lords, but animated by an undying 
zeal, and prompted into ceaseless activity ; waging war some- 
times as the followers and sometimes as the allies of their sov- 
ereign, but in either case diminishing the royal dependence on 
the feudal seigneurs, and in the same proportion diminishing 
the strength which those seigneurs had so long derived from 
holdmg their king in the bonds of that dependence. 

Eleventhly. The Crusades, more than any or than all other 
causes, laid the foundations of those commercial enterprises, 
which, since that period, have never ceased to occupy the atten- 
tion, or to increase the wealth and to secure the liberties of the 
maritime powers of Europe. Though not among the most per- 
severing, France was among the earliest of the competitors for 
these advantages. But in France, as elsewhere, there was and 
could be no reconcilement or compromise between the free 
spu'it of commerce and the despotic spirit of feudalism. Every 
where, and at all times, the merchant has been the successful 
antagonist of the seigneur. 

Before the discovery of America, the great trade of the world 
consisted in the interchange of the products of the Asiatic with 
those of the European continent. It was conducted through 
two routes, the northern and the southern. The northern route 
lay through the Caspian Sea, thence to the Wolga, so overland 
to the Don, and then down that stream to Trebizond and Con- 
stantinople. The southern route lay through the Red Sea to 
Suez, and so to Cairo, and then down the Nile to Damietta and 
Alexandria. Thus the capitals of the G-reek empire and of an- 
cient Egypt. became the two great emporiums for the supply 
of Europe with the merchandise of the East. At the period 
of the Crusades, that merchandise was chiefly composed of silks 
wrought and unwrought, of fine linens and cotton fabrics, of 
sugar, of drugs, of spices, of diamonds, pearls, and other pre- 
cious stones, of silver and of gold. The temporary conquest 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 151 

and occupation of these great marts hj the Crusaders awakened 
in them, and through them m the inhahitants of Western and 
Northern Europe, a taste, till then scarcely known there, for 
these luxuries. The natural, or rather the inevitable, conse- 
quences promptly followed. The most solemn vows to rescue 
or to defend the Holy Sepulclii'e were forgotten hy many a 
champion of the Cross in his too diligent search for pepper, 
nutmegs, and cinnamon. Disguised in Oriental robes and tur- 
bans, many a once ardent pilgrim undertook the exploration 
of new routes to Cashmere or G-olconda. E/Cturning home- 
ward, they concerted, and especially with the merchants of 
Venice, Grenoa, and Pisa, the establishments of Eastern entre- 
pots of trade as rivals to Constantinople and Alexandria. Ere 
long the Pisans had formed factories at Tyre, at Antioch, and 
at Acre. The G-enoese founded a flourishing colony at Jaffa. 
The Yenetians actually put up to auction the islands of the 
Ai'chipelago which had fallen to their share in their victories 
over the Greek empire ; and thus the city of Grallipoli on the 
Hellespont, Naxos, Pares, Milo, Lemnos, and Herinea, became 
commercial establishments of the Dandolos, the Yiaris, and the 
other senators of the Palazzo di Santo Marco. Stranger still, 
the Marseillois and other French citizens obtained a possession, 
half warlike, half mercantile, of the Morea, of which William 
de Champlette became the nominal prince. Louis, count of 
Blois, assumed a feudal sovereignty at Nicaea in Bithynia, with 
the title of Duke. One Regnier de Trit, a gentleman of Hai- 
nault, appeared at Philipopolis in Thrace in a similar character ; 
and that these trading principalities might attain to their com- 
plete anti-classical climax, Otho de la Roche, a Burgundian 
seigneur, erected his throne beneath the shadow of the Par- 
thenon ; and, rejoicing in a title which Alcibiades might have 
envied, was hailed as Duke of Athens and great Lord of Thebes : 
*' Due d'Athenes et grand Sire de Thebes." Those French set- 
tlements were, indeed, formed rather to gratify the ambition 
of the military chiefs who commanded them, than to promote 
the speculations of the traders who settled there, for the wor- 
ship of the goddess Griory is no modern form of idolatry in 
France. In fact, however, they promoted the commercial much 
more than the political or the military views of the settlers ; 
and when the French were eventually expelled from these Greek 



152 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

and Asiatic conquests, tliey still answered the more vulgar 
purposes of the Lombards in the South, and of the Hauseatic 
confederacy in the North, by whom Paros, and Nicsea, and 
Philipopolis, and Thebes, and Athens were reasonably, though 
perhaps not very poetically, regarded as so many admirable sta- 
tions for the counting-house. 

France did not ultimately participate to any great extent in 
the commerce with the East which her arms had thus thrown 
open to the Italian and the G-erman speculators. The genius 
of her people has never been eminently commercial. But she 
felt deeply and lastingly the influence of the great innovation 
in the trade of the world of which the Crusades were at once 
the commencement and the cause. For the first time in her 
history she then became a maritime power. Till the return 
of Philippe Auguste from the Holy Land, France had been 
accustomed to hire from the Genoese and Pisans the tonnage 
required for the conveyance of her armaments to the East ; 
but, taught by the observations which they had made during 
those voyages, the French studied the arts of naval architec- 
ture and navigation, and became ship-builders on their own 
account. They at the same time adopted the use of the mar- 
iner's compass, and claim to have been the authors of that 
maritime code called the Laws of Oleron, of which England 
acknowledged the authority, and which, if the text writers of 
our own law may be trusted, were first formed and promul- 
gated by Richard I. 

While pursuits such as these grew in popular estimation, 
the feudal lords insensibly, though rapidly, descended from the 
social eminence on which they had hitherto stood. They ceased 
to be the great depositories of the national wealth. Their es- 
tates, and even their dignities, gradually passed into the hands 
of men enriched, not by royal grants or by military plunder, 
but by the sale of wine, and oil, and silk, by money-lending 
and brokerage, by invoices and bills of lading. In the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries, when genealogy was still a 
favorite study in France, few if any of her illustrious families 
could really trace back the nobility of then- ancestors beyond 
the Crusades ; for those families which had been noble at a yet 
earlier period had, under the silent influence of these changes 
of fortune, given place to houses which had till then been 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 153 

merely roturier. It is not in England that we shall seek in 
vain either for an explanation or for examples of a similar rise 
of plebeian and fall of patrician families. But it is in En- 
gland that we shall best find proof of the wisdom of continu- 
ally recruiting the political aristocracy from all those ranks of 
men to whom the popular mind will ever ascribe an aristo- 
cratic dignity ; from the foremost in arms, in senatorial emi- 
nence, in forensic triumphs, in territorial or in commercial 
wealth. The ancient French seigneurs despised and rejected 
such alliances, until they were themselves despised and re- 
jected as allies by the noblesse who had superseded them. 
The same error was committed again by the nobles of modern 
France, and with the same disastrous results. If the court- 
iers of Louis XV. had well pondered the history of their coun- 
try, both before and after the Crusades, they might have fore- 
seen that just as the novi homines of the fourteenth century 
had usurped and crushed the Feudal power, so the Bourgeois 
of the eighteenth were about to usurp and to crush their own. 
Twelfthly. The Crusades contributed to diffuse over West- 
ern Europe an intellectual light fatal to that barbaric dark- 
ness which had first nourished the germs, and had then fostered 
the growth of the Feudal power. 

It was the boast of Rome that she civilized those whom she 
conquered. It was at once the better founded and the nobler 
boast of Greece, that she civilized her conquerors, and subju- 
gated, by her superior wisdom, those who had subdued herself 
by their superior force. Degenerate as were the Greeks at 
Constantinople in the Middle Ages, they might still assert 
their hereditary title to this species of intellectual triumph. 
They still spoke the language of Homer, and of Plato, and of 
Chrysostom. They still preserved and admired the Olympian 
Jupiter of Phidias, the Venus of Praxiteles, and the Juno of 
Lysippus. The Corinthian Horses, which now stand before 
the Church of St. Marc, and which once stood between the 
Louvre and the Tuilleries, were then among the embellish- 
ments of the capital of the East. To their Saracenic invaders 
they nnparted the knowledge of Aristotle, and of many other 
less illustrious Greek pliilosophers. AvaiUng themselves of 
these new lights, the Arabs established at Cah'o, at Bassora, 
at Fez, at Tunis, at Alexandria, and in many other cities, 



154 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 

schools for translating and teacliing the treatises on medicine, 
astronomy, geometry, and chemistry which they had demand- 
ed and obtained from the Byzantine emperor. They founded 
for the same purpose a still more celebrated college at Salerno, 
which supplied the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Ca- 
sino with at least one of its most eminent scholars. When, 
in their turn, the crusading Franks laid siege to Constantino- 
ple, they also, in turn, drew instruction from the ever salient 
fountains of Grecian learning. In that age of tardy and diffi- 
cult communication between remote countries, as in the times 
of Pythagoras and Herodotus, knowledge was to be acquired 
chiefly by toilsome foreign travel, and by the personal inter- 
course with each other of learned and inquisitive men of dif- 
ferent and distant nations. And as in the eighteenth and 
nineteenth, so in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a French 
invading force was seldom unattended by savans skillful to 
scrutinize, and prompt to appropriate, the literary wealth of 
the lands through which they passed. Traversing the Greek 
emphe, and many of the Saracenic provinces, those half mili- 
tary scholars gathered, in each, the learning and the arts 
which, originally issuing from Athens and Corinth, had been 
cherished at Constantinople, and had thence been transplanted 
by the Moslem into Syria, and Africa, and Egypt. 

In imparting these stores of knowledge to Western Europe, 
the Arabs proved themselves more zealous and more success- 
ful than the Greeks. The moral and the physical sciences 
were in that age far better cultivated and understood on the 
banks of the Nile than on the shores of the Hellespont ; and, 
amid the disasters of his Egyptian crusade, St. Louis found 
the leisure to examine, as he had the candor to admire, the 
noble collections of books formed by the care of the later 
Emirs. The library of La Sainte Chapelle, at Paris, though 
the germ of the Bibliotheque du Roi, was originally nothing 
more than an imitation, by that great man, of the treasury of 
learning which the Calif Almamon Abdallah, and his success- 
ors, had extorted from the fears of the Byzantine court. The 
French universities caught and propagated the flame which 
thus, even amid the shock of arms, was kindled in the bosoms 
of some studious men. The morals, the logic, the politics, 
and the physics of Aristotle took possession of the schools of 



THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 155 

Paris ; and though, at first, they were placed by a provin*. \al 
council holden there among heretical hooks, and sentenced to 
the flames, yet, in the lifetime of St. Louis himself, they had 
found in his friend, St. Thomas Aquinas, a commentator who 
devoted five volumes to the reconcilement of the doctrines of 
the Stagyrite with those of the Evangelists. And then came 
forth, and especially from our own land, that wonderful race 
of men, the seraphic and irrefragable doctors, whose peculiar 
office it was to exercise and educate those faculties of the hu- 
man mind which were destined in a later age diligently to in- 
terrogate nature, and humbly and faithfully to record her an- 
swers. 

Philosophy was not the only intellectual conquest achieved 
by the Crusaders. They opened to the European world a far 
more exact and comprehensive insight than it had before pos- 
sessed mto the science of geography ; and then, for the first 
time, since the rise of the Crescent in the East, Armenia, 
Tartary, and India were explored by missionaries of the Cross. 
Thus St. Louis dispatched to the Grrand Khan of Tartary the 
friar William de Rubruquis, or Ruystrock (for he was a na- 
tive of Brabant), and the Venetian Sanutus prepared, for the 
use of the Crusaders, a series of maps of the Asiatic shores of 
the Mediterranean. Jacques de Yitryalso composed a history 
of the East, which he is said to have illustrated by a map of 
the world. 

But to the Crusades, history is even yet more indebted than 
geography, for they gave birth to a new and admirable race 
of historians. Till then the political and military events of 
the world had been chronicled exclusively by monks, most of 
whom were as credulous as they were ignorant. There were 
not wanting such monkish narratives of the holy wars. Many 
have been published, and there is reason to suppose that many 
more even yet remain in MS. But in those great movements 
of the world, two French knights, Villehardouin and Joinville, 
were happily prompted by religion, by patriotism, and by loy- 
alty, to record for the information of future ages the actions 
which they had themselves shared or witnessed. They might 
have found successful rivals in the Cardinal de Vitry and the 
Archbishop of Tyre, if, unfortunately, both of those church- 
men had not been too learned to employ their mother tongue 



156 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 

on so solemn an occasion. The Latin of tlie ecclesiastics is 
reserved for the curious few. The antique and picturesque 
French of the military annahst is for all readers and for aU 
^venerations. It is their peculiar honor to have been the found- 
ers of that literary school in whose works France is so pre- 
eminently rich — a school of which Froissart, Philip de Co- 
mines, Sully, D'Aubigne, De Retz, and St. Simon are the most 
illustrious ornaments — and whose characteristic distinction it 
is at once to inlay the field of history with the most amusing 
and pathetic biographical incidents, and to cast over it all the 
warm glow of dramatic action. 

It would be easy to prolong the examination of the various 
impulses which the Crusades gave to the growth and develop- 
ment of sound knowledge ; but enough may have been said to 
indicate the general relation which subsisted between those ex- 
peditions and that result ; nor can it be necessary to enter at all 
into either the proof or the illustration of the fact, that as art, 
and science, and poetry, and philosophy, and geography, and 
history flourished, Feudalism declined. Each new ray of light 
which shot across the gloom, disclosed more and more clearly 
to the seigneurs the instability of their tenure of power, and to 
their serfs and free vassals the means by which they might vin- 
dicate their freedom ; for of all the varieties of political insti- 
, tutes under which the nations of the earth have ever lived, 
' the Feudal system is perhaps the only one which, during its 
// existence, was sustained by no popular enthusiasm, and which, 
after its overthrow, was followed by no popular regrets. It 
was a protracted reign of terror ; and, so far as I am aware, 
no trace exists, either in the lighter or in the more serious 
literature of the Middle Ages, of any sentiments having been 
entertained by the people at large toward the chatelains, the 
barons, and the seigneurs, under whom they lived, but such 
as terror invariably inspires. The writers of romance and 
poetry in our own age have found their account in depicting 
the brilliant spectacles which the society of Europe is sup- 
posed to have exhibited in those warlike times, and in giving 
utterance to the patriarchal attachment and to the loyal rever- 
ence by which they have imagined the actors in those scenes 
to have been animated. When we deliberately enter Fairy 
Land, we of course expect to be greeted with fairy tales ; but 



THE ALBIGEJVSIAN CRUSADES, 157 

if we are willing to quit the world of fiction for the world of 
realities, we must acknowledge that Feudalism was nothing 
better than a stern, relentless, and unmitigated tyranny ; the 
nearest approach which has ever been made in the Western 
world, and in the lands which Christianity has claimed for her 
own, to the blighting and heartless cruelty which divides and 
governs the nations of the East by the institution of separate 
and indelible castes. Feudalism, indeed, had its appointed 
office in the history and progress of Clu-istendom. It was the 
discipline through which if was necessary for mankind to pass 
m their progi-ess to social improvement and civilization. The 
Crusades, guilty, insane, and wasteful as they were, had also 
their destined purposes to serve. Among them, not the least 
important was that of bringing the feudal discipline to a 
close as soon as the office assigned to it had been accom- 
plished. 

But during the invasion of Africa and the East by the Eu- 

ropean world, there arose in the bosom of France itself another 

Crusade, teeming with results even yet more momentous in 

the constitutional history of that country. I refer to the war 

, of the Albigenses, which issued in the conquest of Southern 

, by Northern France, and in the addition to the domain of the 

, French kings of all the sea-coast and of all the rich territories 

. which connect the Alps with the Pyrenees. On that subject 

: I proposo to enter when we next meet. 



LECTURE VII. 

ON THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 

I Having in my last lecture considered the influence of the 
; Crusades in elevating the French Monarchy on the ruins of the 
, Feudal Confederation of France, I proceed to inquire how far 
! the war against the Albigenses contributed to the same result. 
It was no common contest. It was a prolonged tragedy, enact- 
ed in a conspicuous theatre by characters boldly contrasted 
with each other, and closing in a catastrophe which revealed, 
; even to the most heedless spectators, the controlling presence 



158 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 

of that divine agency which alone imparts to human affairs 
their true though mysterious significance. 

In passing from one epoch of the history of France to 
another, I have thus far chiefly, if not exclusively, endeavored 
to throw light on each hy commentaries rather than by nar- 
rative, assuming that they whom I have had the honor to ad- 
dress as my pupils were already well apprised of those histor- 
ical events to which I have had occasion to refer. But at the 
present stage of my progress I do not venture to rely on that 
assumption ; for in most, if not in all the histories of France, 
the Crusade against the Alhigeois appears and reappears at 
intervals, so frequent yet so remote from each other, as to he 
destructive of all continuity of thought and of all distinctness 
of recollection on the subject ; nor have I happened to meet 
with any unbroken account of those wars which gives a clear, 
exact, and compendious view of their origin, their progress, 
and their results. The following very rapid summary will not, 
indeed, supply that defect ; but it will (I trust) enable me to 
render intelligible to all my audience remarks which might 
otherwise convey no very definite meaning to some of the 
younger members of it. 

At the accession of Philippe Auguste, the greater part of the 
south of France was holden, not of him, but of Pedro of Arra- 
gon, as the supreme suzerain. To the Arragonese king belong- 
ed especially the counties of Provence, Forcalquier, Narbonne, 
Beziers, and Carcassonne. His supremacy was acknowledged 
by the Counts of Beam, of Armagnac, of Bigorre, of Commin- 
ges, of Foix, of Roussillon, and of Montpellier ; while the pow- 
erful Count of Toulouse, surrounded by his estates and vassals, 
maintained with difficulty his independence against him. 

To these extensive territories were given the names some- 
times of Provence, in the larger and less exact use of that word, 
and sometimes of Languedoc, in allusion to the rich, harmoni- 
ous, picturesque, and flexible language which was then vernac- 
ular there. They who used it called themselves Proven (;aux or 
Aquitanians, to indicate that they were not Frenchmen, but 
members of a different and indeed of a hostile nation. 

Tracing their descent to the ancient Roman colonists and to 
the Grothic invaders of Southern Graul, the Provenijaux regard-, 
ed with a mixture of contempt, of fear, and ill will, the inhab- 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 159 

itants of the coimtry nortli of the Loire, who had made far less 
progress than themselves, either in civil liberty, or in the arts 
and refinements of social life. 

For the traditions of their ancient Roman franchises had 
never entirely died away among the people of Southern G-aul. 
Though often overrun by the Franks, under the two first dy- 
nasties, they had never been effectually subjugated ; and Tou- 
louse, Marseilles, Aries, Beziers, and many other of their greater 
cities, emulous of the Itahan republics, with whom they traded 
and formed alliances, were themselves living under a govern- 
ment which was virtually republican. 

Each of these free cities being, however, the capital of one 
of the gi'eater lords among whom the whole of Aquitaine was 
parceled out, became the seat of a prmoely and luxurious 
court. A genial chmate, a fertile soil, and an active com- 
merce, rendered the means of subsistence abundant even to 
the poor, and gave to the rich ample resources for indulging 
in all the gratifications which wealth can purchase. The en- 
joyments thus brought within their reach were eagerly seized 
and recklessly abused. They lived as if life had been one pro- 
tracted holiday. Theirs was the land of feasting, of gallantry, 
and of mhth. Bat they were too great adepts in the joyous 
science they professed, to be satisfied with the delights of sense 
in their coarser and less sublimated forms. They refined and 
enhanced the pleasures of appetite by the pleasures of the ima- 
gination. They played with the stern features of war in nightly 
tournaments. They parodied the severe toils of justice m their 
courts of love. They transferred the poet's sacred office and 
high vocation to the Troubadours, whose amatory and artifi- 
cial effusions posterity has willingly let die, notwithstanding 
the recent labors of MM. Raynouard and Fauriel to revive 
them. Nor is any one who has looked into the works of those 
learned commentators ignorant that the Chansons and Sirven- 
tes which charmed the courts of Toulouse and St. Grilles indi- 
cated a state of society such as never has existed and never 
can exist among men, except as the herald of great and of 
swiftly approaching calamities. 

The imputations of irreUgion, heresy, and shameless debauch- 
eries, which have been cast with so much bitterness on the 
Albigenses by their persecutors, and which have been so zeal- 



160 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

ously denied by their apologists, are probably not ill founded, 
if the word "Albigenses" be employed as synonymous with 
the words Provenyaux or Languedocians ; for they were appar- 
ently a race among whom the hallowed charities of domestic 
life, and the reverence due to divine ordinances, and the hom- 
age due to divine truth, were often impaired, and not seldom 
extinguished, by ribald jests, by infidel scoffings, and by heart- 
hardening impurities. Like other voluptuaries, the Provenqaux 
(as their remaining literature attests) were accustomed to find 
matter for merriment in vices which would have moved wise 
men to tears. 

But if by the word "Albigenses" be meant the Vaudois, or 
those followers (or associates) of Peter "Waldo who revived the 
doctrines against which the Church of Rome directed her cen- 
sures, then the accusation of dissoluteness of manners may be 
safely rejected as altogether calumnious, and the charge of 
heresy may be considered, if not as entirely unfounded, yet as 
a cruel and injurious exaggeration. 

In the unrestrained license of speculation which invariably 
succeeds to such a revolt as theirs from ancient authority, many 
rash and dangerous theories have, as we too well know, been 
always hazarded ; and it is, therefore, not reasonable to refuse 
all credit to the statement of the historians hostile to them, that, 
among the Albigenses, there were not wanting some who gave 
such scope to their fancy as almost to destroy the whole sys- 
tem of revealed truth. But from the same testimony we may 
mfer, that these were the few exceptions, and that, in general, 
they anticipated and held the same doctrines which, after the 
lapse of three centuries, were to be promulgated by the Re- 
formers of G-ermany and of England. Unless we will argue 
and agree with Bossuet, we must believe that the extravagan- 
cies of opinion which freedom of religious thought will infalli- 
bly generate in feeble or presumptuous minds, derogate noth- 
ing from the conclusions which, in the exercise of the same 
freedom, have been established by the more wise, devout, and 
teachable Reformers of the Church. 

It was with deep foresight and anxious forebodings that 
Innocent III. was at this time watching the progress of the 
new-born spirit of intellectual independence among mankind. 
His immediate predecessors, in their struggle with the two 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 161 

Henrys and with Frederic Barbarossa, had disregarded, if 
they had not encouraged it. But Innocent was incapable of 
temporizing. Called in the vigor of his age to wield that un- 
limited empire over the minds of men, of which Hildebrand 
had laid the foundations, he was conducted by a remorseless 
logic to consequences from which his heart must have revolt- 
ed if it had not been hardened by the possession of absolute 
power, and inflamed by the indulgence of a morose fanaticism ; 
for Grod had given him a mind not incapable of generous 
emotions, with an mtellect large enough to comprehend, and 
a will sufiiciently energetic to control, the widest system of 
human poUcy. While destroying the balance of power in Grer- 
many and Italy, menacing and contending with all the sov- 
ereigns of Europe by turns, directing the march of the Crusad- 
ers, overturning by their means the G-reek empire at Constan- 
tinople, and pouring himself out in countless letters, of which 
nearly two thousand remain to us, he was still observing and 
punishing every dissent from the tenets of the Church of Rome, 
and, indeed, every exercise of the thinking faculty on religious 
subjects, with that boundless reliance on his own infallibility, 
which is the common basis of all persecution, and with that 
utter recklessness of human suffering, into which any man 
may be plunged by his malignant passions, when they assume 
the veil and the pretext of a seeming piety. 

In the year 1207, Innocent had sent into Languedoc Peter 
of Castelnau as his apostolic legate. Twice had Castelnau 
required Raymond, count of Toulouse, the sixth of that name, 
to exterminate his heretical subjects with sword and fire ; and 
twice, when dissatisfied with his zeal in that atrocious office, 
had he excommunicated him, and laid his dominions under an 
interdict. The wrong was aggravated by insults such as a 
feudal prince could not but regard with lively indignation, and 
such as the legate would not have hazarded except in the con- 
fidence inspired by the immunities of his sacred character. 
Yielding at last to the impulse of his wrath, Raymond, in 
an unhappy moment, exclaimed that he would make Castel- 
nau answer for his insolence with his life. The menace was 
heard by one of his attendants, who, following the legate to a 
little inn on the right bank of the Rhone, entered into a new 

L 



162 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

and angry debate with him there, and at length plunged a 
poniard into his heart. 

The victim was not a Thomas a Becket ; the offender was 
not a Henry Plantagenet ; hut neither was the avenger an Al- 
exander the Third. From the Papal chancery issued one hull 
after another, absolving the subjects of Raymond from their 
oaths of allegiance ; permitting every Catholic to assail his per- 
son ; (exhorting all men to assist in his destruction, and in the 
extermination of his heretical subjects ; and promising to those 
who should. take the cross against the Provencaux the utmost 
indulgence which had ever been granted to the champions of 
the Holy Sepulchre. 

To that ignorant and superstitious generation, no summons 
could have been more welcome. Danger, privations, and fa- 
tigue, in their direst forms, had beset the rugged path by which 
the Crusaders in the East had fought their way to the prom- 
ised paradise. But m the war against the Albigenses, the same 
inestimable recompense was to be won, not by self-denial, but 
by self-indulgence. Every debt owing to man was to be can- 
celed, every offense already committed against the law of G-od 
was to be pardoned, and an eternity of blessedness was to be 
won, not by a life of future sanctity, but by a life of future 
crime ; not by the restraint, but by the gratification, of their 
foulest passions ; by satiating their cruelty, their avarice, and 
their lust, at the expense of a people whose wealth excited 
their covetousness, and whose superiority provoked their re- 
sentment. 

From one end of Europe to another, but especially in the 
immediate neighborhood of Languedoc, was therefore heard 
the din of martial preparation. Some of the writers of that 
age raise to half a million the number of the host which, in 
obedience to the voice of Innocent, gathered in three gi-eat 
armies, over each of which presided either an archbishop, a 
bishop, or a mitered abbot. The more reasonable estimate of 
Peter de Vaux Cernay reduces it to fifty thousand. Among 
the secular leaders of this sacred war were the Duke of Bur- 
gundy and the Counts of Nevers, St. Pol, Auxerre, and Grene- 
va. But emment above all the rest, for well-proved courage 
and skill in arms, was Simon de Montfort, the lord of a petty 
fief near Paris, and earl of Leicester in right of his mother, an 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 163 

English or Anglo-Norman lady. It would be a kind ol trea- 
son against our common humanity to doubt that there were 
still some links which attached to it the heart even of this 
cruel and perfidious Crusader ; but in history he is depicted, 
even by his eulogists, as if existing among his fellow-men for 
no end but to excite theu* terror and to justify their abhor- 
rence. Of the ecclesiastical chiefs, by whose counsels or com- 
mands he was guided, the most conspicuous were St. Dominic 
and his brethren, who traversed the devoted land as the mis- 
sionaries and the spies of Rome ; and Arnold Amalric, the pa- 
pal legate ; and the monks of Citeaux, or Bernardins, whose 
peculiar province it was to preach the duty of engaging in this 
holy war ; and Foulques, or Fouquet, a monk, who ultimate- 
ly rose to become the bishop of Toulouse. This man, who 
had earned in his youth a shameful celebrity by profligate 
amours, which he has himself celebrated in his still extant and 
most licentious verse, passed the evening of his life in stimu- 
lating and conducting the massacre of the people whose un- 
happy doom it was to have received him as the chief pastor 
of their spiritual fold. 

Under the conduct of these captains and of these ecclesias- 
tics, the mighty armament advanced along the valley of the 
Rhine. But the heart of Raymond quailed at the gathering 
tempest. He seems to have been a man of gentle, kindly, and 
indolent disposition, whose unambitious aim it was to float 
quietly down the stream of life, receiving and imparting such 
pleasures as were to be had without any painful or perilous 
sacrifice, and yet really gifted with nobler powers — with cour- 
age, force, and elevation of mind, which, though dormant un- 
der the enervating influence of his luxurious habits, were at 
length revealed for the first time to the world, and probably to 
himself, under the stern discipline of prolonged calamity. To 
avert the impending storm of papal indignation, he now hum- 
bled himself before Innocent, and his penitence seemed to be 
accepted ; but Raymond was soon to learn how cruel are the 
tender mercies of a persecutor. 

The conditions of his pardon were, that he should surren- 
der seven of his best castles as a pledge of his fidelity ; that 
he should submit himself to the futujre judgment of the papal 
legate on the charge of heresy ; that he should do pubUc pen- 



164 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

ance for his past offenses ; and that he should then, in his own 
person, become a Crusader against his own subjects. Each 
part of this humihating compact was fulfilled rigorously and 
to the letter. The count appeared in the Cathedral of St. 
Griles with naked shoulders, and bearing round his neck a cord, 
either end of which was carried by a bishop. By their hands 
the scourge was laid upon his person, not as a mere humili- 
ating ceremony, but with hearty good will to the task, till, 
covered with blood, and in an agony of distress and shame, the 
unhappy Count of Toulouse was permitted to escape from his 
tormentors, and from the vast crowd which had gathered to 
witness this almost incredible degradation of their suzerain 
lord. Nor was the vindictive soliI of Innocent to be really 
propitiated even by this abasement of his enemy. "We coun- 
sel you with the Apostle Paul (I quote from a letter from the 
pontiff to his agents in Provence, written at this time) to em- 
ploy guile with regard to this count ; for in this case it ought 
to be called prudence. We must attack separately those who 
are separated from unity. Leave for a time this Count of 
Toulouse, employing toward him a wise dissimulation, that 
the other heretics may be the more easily defeated, and that 
afterward we may crush him when he shall be left alone." 

In obedience to this atrocious policy, Raymond was, for the 
moment, left in such peace as could consist with sach igno- 
minies and with such sacrifices as his ; and the tide of war, 
diverted from himself, was directed against his young and 
gallant kinsman, Roger, the viscount of Beziers. One after 
another the castles of Roger were abandoned, bLirned, or captur- 
ed ; and then, at the bidding of the Legate Amalric, and amid 
the acclamations of the ferocious Crusaders, such suspected 
heretics as were found there were cast headlong into the flames. 
The chief strength of Roger consisted in his two great cities of 
Beziers and Carcassonne ; but Beziers fell at the first assault. 
Pausing at the open gates, the knights inquired of Amalric 
how they should distinguish the Catholics from the heretics. 
" Kill them all," replied the legate. " The Lord will know 
those who are his." Fearfully was the injunction obeyed. In 
the great church of St. Nicaise had assembled a vast multitude, 
in hope of finding a sanctuary within those hallowed walls. 
Not one of them survived the carnage. Another trembling 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 165 

crowd had sought protection in the church of the Magdalen. 
Beven thousand of their dead bodies were afterward counted 
on the spot. The slaughter ceased at length from the mere 
want of new victims. Not one human being of those who so 
lately had thronged the marts and streets of Beziers remained 
alive. "When the booty had been withdrawn, the Crusaders 
set fu'e to the city, and the blackened ruins of Beziers alone 
long stood there a dismal monument to the memory of her 
former inhabitants. 

From Beziers the triumphant host advanced to Carcassonne. 
There Roger commanded in person, and sustained the siege 
with admirable constancy, until, in reliance on a safe-conduct 
from the legate and lords of the army, confirmed by their oaths, 
he visited their camp, proposing there to enter into a confer- 
ence and negotiation with them. But with so formidable a 
heretic faith was not to be kept. Amalric caused him to be 
arrested and given into the charge of De Montfort. From that 
custody he was not long afterward delivered by death; nor 
did any one doubt that he died by violence. Carcassonne, 
abandoned by her garrison, was then entered by the Crusaders, 
and the princely heritage of the Viscount of Beziers remained 
at the mercy of the conquerors. By the legate, and two bish- 
ops, and as many knights whom he associated with them, it 
was conferred on Simon de Montfort, on the condition of his 
rendering an annual tribute to the Pope, as liege lord of the 
conquered territories. The curtain then fell on the first act of 
this sanguinary drama. 

The conquest of the viscounty of Beziers had rather inflamed 
than satiated the cupidity of De Montfort, and the fanaticism 
of Amalric and of the monks of Citeaux. Raymond, count of 
Toulouse, still possessed the fairest part of Languedoc, and 
was still suspected or accused of affording shelter, if not coun- 
tenance, to his heretical subjects. To escape the power of his 
terrible accusers, he took refuge in Rome itself, and there im- 
plored the protection and favor of the sovereign pontiff. His 
reception was encouraging and even gracious. Innocent ab- 
solved him provisionally, but referred him to a council to be 
holden in Provence by the legates, who, with the aid of that 
synod, were finally to hear and decide the charges still im- 
pending over him, of heresy, andof pa,rticipation in the murder 



166 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

of the legate, Castelnau. To assist at that council, tlie Pope 
dispatched Theodise, a Grenoese monk, of whom, in the history 
of Peter de Yaux Cernay, the panegyrist and vassal of De 
Montfort, we read as follows : " He was a circumspect man, 
prudent, and very zealous for the affairs of Grod ; and he de- 
sired above all things to find some pretext of right to refuse 
the count that opportunity of justifying himself which Inno- 
cent had granted him." Such a pretext was easily found ; 
and the count was informed by his judges that his defense 
could not be received. On hearing this ominous intelligence, 
he burst into tears ; when, in imitation of the words, though 
neither in the meaning nor the spirit of the Psalmist, Theodise 
contemptuously exclaimed, " Thy tears extend not unto the 
Lord." The unhappy Raymond was then again excommuni- 
cated from the Christian Church, and his dominions offered as 
a reward to the champions who should execute her sentence 
against him. 

To earn that reward, De Montfort, at the head of a new host 
of Crusaders, attracted by the promise of earthly spoils and of 
heavenly blessedness, once more marched through the devoted 
land, and with him advanced Amalric. At each successive 
conquest, slaughter, rapine, and woes, such as may not be de- 
scribed, tracked and polluted their steps. Heretics, or those 
suspected of heresy, wherever they were found, were compell- 
ed by the legate to ascend vast piles of burning fagots, and, 
in the name of the Redeemer of mankind, were presented to 
him who is Love, sacrifices infinitely more atrocious than had 
ever been offered on the foulest altars of Moloch. At length 
the Crusaders reached and laid siege to the city of Toulouse. 
It was already the scene of intestine war. Fouquet, who was 
now the bishop of it, had organized there a band called the 
White Company, who were pledged to the destruction of their 
heretical fellow-citizens. To them had been opposed another 
band, called the Black Company, composed of the adherents 
of the count. Throwing himself into the place, Raymond 
united both the hostile companies in his own service, and by 
their aid succeeded in repulsing De Montfort and Amalric. It 
was, however, but a temporary respite, and the prelude to a 
fearful destruction. From beyond the Pyrenees, at the head 
of 1000 knights, Pedro of Arragon had marched to the rescue 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 167 

of Raymond his kinsman, and of the Counts of Foix and of 
Comminges, and of the Yiseount of Beam, his vassals ; and 
their united forces came into communication with each other 
at Muret, a little toAvn which is about tlu'ee leagues distant 
from Toulouse. There also, on the 12th of September, at the 
head of the champions of the Cross, and attended by seven 
bishops, appeared Simon de Montfort in full military array. 
The battle which followed was fierce, short, and decisive. 
A Spanish knight, who on that day wore the armor of his 
king, was bending beneath the blows of his assailants, who 
were heard to cry out, " This can not be the gallant knight, 
Don Pedro of Arragon." " Don Pedro is here !" exclaimed the 
generous monarch, as, flying to the rescue of his officer, he 
threw himself into the thickest of the fight. Closing round 
him, his enemies bore him to the earth, and Don Pedro was 
numbered with the slain. His army, deprived of his command, 
broke and dispersed, and the whole of the infantry of Raymond 
and his allies were either put to the sword, or swept away by 
the current of the G-aronne. Toulouse immediately surrender- 
ed, and the whole of the dominions of Raymond submitted to 
the conquerors. At a council subsequently held at Montpellier, 
composed of five archbishops and twenty-eight bishops, De 
Montfort was unanimously acknowledged as prince of the fief 
and city of Toulouse, and of the other counties conquered by 
the Crusaders under his command. Overwhelmed by his mis- 
fortunes and by the censures of the Church, Raymond offered 
no opposition to this sentence. Having resigned the palace of 
his ancestors to Fouquet, who came with an armed force to 
take possession of it, he retired into an obscure, and, as he 
vainly hoped, an unmolested privacy. And thus terminated 
the second stage of the war of the Albigenses. 

The conquest appeared to be complete, but the conquerors 
were now to reap the bitter fruits of a triumphant injustice. 
Amalric and De Montfort each claimed the dukedom of Nar- 
bonne ; the legate insisting that the ducal crown was insep- 
arable from the archiepiscopal mitre ; the new Count of Tou- 
louse asserting that the feudal sovereignty of Narbonne had 
become a forfeiture to himself, as the suzerain lord of that 
province. The crusader, therefore, invaded the prelate, and 
the prelate excommunicated the crusader. Though not di- 



168 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

rectly interposing in this strife, the Pope had learned to regard 
with jealousy the formidahle power which he had so largely 
contributed to create ; and, in the year 1215, he convened the 
twelfth of the CEcumenical, and the fourth of the Lateran 
councils, in order to bring to an end the Crusade against the 
Albigenses, and finally to dispose of the conquered territories. 
At that great synod appeared Count Raymond, attended by 
his son, who was afterward distinguished by the title of Ray- 
mond YII. Prostrating themselves before the assembled fa- 
thers of the Church, the princes recounted the wrongs which 
had been inflicted on them by De Montfort, and the enormous 
cruelties of Fouquet, whom they denounced as the destroyer 
of more than ten thousand of the flock intrusted to his pastoral 
care. Nor were their complaints unheeded. Some pity seems 
to have touched the heart of Innocent, who not only absolved 
Raymond YI., but (if some of the writers of that age be well 
informed) privately encouraged the younger Ptaymond to at- 
tempt the recovery by arms of the heritage of his house. Some 
remorse seems also to have visited the members of the council, 
who reserved for Raymond YII. the countship of Yenaissin 
and the marquisate of Provence, and replaced the Counts of 
Foix and of Comminges provisionally in possession of their 
estates. But neither the Council nor the Pope could resist the 
other claims of De Montfort. They assigned to him the rest 
of the countries he had conquered ; and Philippe Augiiste, ac- 
quiescing in this sentence, granted to him the investiture of 
the countships of Toulouse, of Beziers, and of Carcassonne, 
and of the dukedom of Narbonne. And thus, for a moment, 
Simon de Montfort reposed in seeming security on the throne 
to which he had waded through seas of blood. This repose, 
however, was but momentary. 

The termination of the Crusade by the sentence of the Lat- 
eran Council had deprived De Montfort of all support, except 
from his own unaided resources. But the abhorrence of his 
cruelties, and the attachment to their hereditary sovereigns, 
which animated the whole population of Languedoo, threw 
resources of far greater importance into the hands of the two 
Raymonds. One revolt of the citizens of Toulouse had been 
detected by the perfidious falsehood of Fouquet, and punished 
with all his relentless cruelty. But on the appearance beneath 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 169 

their walls of some recruits from Spain, commanded by tlie 
Raymonds, fear and every other emotion gave way to the en- 
thusiastic joy with which the people welcomed back their an- 
cient lords to the house and the dominion of their ancestors. 
A sudden insurrection overwhelmed the soldiers and partisans 
of De Montfort, and again the standard of the house of St. Gril- 
les waved above the palace and the ramparts of Toulouse. 
The knights and commons of Languedoo eagerly rallied under 
it, and De Montfort was now once more to undertake the con- 
quest of the territories which he had so dearly won and so 
unexpectedly lost. He commenced it by laying siege to Tou- 
louse. On the 25th of June, 1218, he knelt at the high mass 
which the priests in attendance on him were celebrating, in a 
church in the suburbs of the city. At the moment of the ele- 
vation of the host, a loud shout announced that the besieged 
had made a sally, and were attacking an enormous wooden 
tower which he had erected for their destruction. Vaulting 
on his feet, De Montfort, in the words of Simeon, exclaimed, 
" Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine 
eyes have seen thy salvation ;" and flying toward the tower, 
placed himself at the head of his veterans, and with all his 
former gallantry repulsed the assailants. At that moment a 
fragment of a rock, launched from a machine on the city walls, 
stretched him lifeless on the ground. The siege was raised. 
In tumults of exultation, Toulouse hailed Raymond as her 
lawful, and now her undisputed sovereign ; and the thhd act 
of this eventful drama was completed. 

Innocent III. was now dead, and the papal throne was oc- 
cupied by the thhd Honor ius, who ill brooked the triumph of 
those whom he had so long abhorred as the enemies of the true 
faith, and as outcasts from the Church. Louis, the son of 
Philippe Auguste, had once already labored to insure his eter- 
nal welfare by conducting a crusade against the Albigenses, 
To him, therefore, Honorius assigned half of the funds which 
had been raised for the support of the Eastern Crusade, on 
condition of his renewing the same sanguinary, but too wel- 
conie warfare. Assisted by Amaury de Montfort, the son and 
heir of Simon, Louis accordingly invaded Languedoo, and, at 
the head of a large army, once more laid siege to Toulouse. 
But the leaguer even of tne heir to the crown of France. 



170 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

proved unequal to so arduous an enterprise. The city was 
valiantly defended by the younger Raymond. The faith in the 
saving efficacy of the slaughter of heretics was dying away iii 
those parts of France from which the monks of Citeaux had 
hitherto drawn their most effective levies, and the new papal 
legate could discover no other resource than that of creating a 
new fraternity, called the Order of the Holy Faith, the mem- 
bers of which were bound by solemn vows to employ their ut- 
most powers for the destruction of all heretics rebelling against 
the Church and against Amaury de Montfort, Even this de- 
vice proved ineffectual. The war languished. Louis returned 
to France. The elder Raymond died, leaving the defense of 
his states to his son, then in the vigor of his age and hopes. 
Philippe Auguste also died, leaving his crown to Louis, who 
in vain contributed supplies of men and money for the subju- 
gation of Raymond YII. In the month of January, 1224, the 
younger De Montfort, despairing of success, finally abandoned 
Languedoc, and bartered his hereditary rights to his father's 
conquests there for the office of Constable of France, which 
was granted to him by Louis VIII. as the price or equivalent 
for them. And thus, at the close of several campaigns, sig- 
nalized by no martial achievements, and memorable for no 
signal occurrences, Raymond, the seventh count of Toulouse, 
of the family of St. G-illes, found himself in possession of the 
dominions of his ancestors, with no antagonists to dread ex- 
cept the monarch to whom he was eager to do homage as his 
suzerain, and the pontiff to whom he was resolved to refuse 
no concession which might propitiate the offended majesty of 
papal Rome. And thus, at the end of the fourth act of this 
protracted strife, the scene presented an unwonted prospect of 
approaching repose. 

It was, however, an illusive prospect. In the year 1225, 
Honorius convened at Bourges a provincial council, which en- 
joined Louis VIII. to purge the land of heretics, and assigned 
to him for that purpose one tenth of the whole ecclesiastical 
revenues of France during the next five years. Louis accord- 
ingly took the cross, and, attended by a large number of his 
barons and their followers, advanced once again to devastate 
the territories of the Languedocians, and to exterminate all 
heretics among them. This was the first time that the ban- 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 171 

ner of a king of France had. been unfurled in these Crusades. 
The hearts of the people sunk within them. They were so 
worn out by repeated invasions, their country had so frequent- 
ly been laid desolate, the bonds of society among them had so 
often been torn asunder, and they had so repeatedly endured 
all the horrors of war in all their most fearful forms, that the 
barons, knights, and communes of Languedoc, with one accord, 
hastened to avert, by timely concessions, the threatened renew- 
al of these intolerable calamities. All seemed lost to the cause 
of Raymond, when again the mighty mnovator. Death, inter- 
posed to postpone the impending ruin of that princely house. 
In November, 1226, Louis VIII. fell a victim to a contagious 
disease, which had swept away 30,000 of his soldiers. His 
son was yet an infant, and the regent of France was a woman. 
But that infant was, under the title of Louis IX., to become 
the most illustrious of all the kings and of all the saints of 
France ; and that woman, Blanche of Castile, was alone, of all 
the females who have been called to the regency of that king- 
dom, to vindicate by her policy her title to so high and ardu- 
ous a trust. By her orders the siege of Toulouse was re- 
sumed. 

Fouquet, the evil genius of the place, suggested to the be- 
siegers the only means of a successful attack on the people 
over whom he had been appointed to be overseer. By his ad- 
vice, the whole of the adjacent country was converted into a 
desolate wilderness, till Toulouse remained in the centre of a 
desert, from which no supplies of any kind could be procured. 
The spirit of Raymond himself gave way when this new vial 
of wrath was poured out on his devoted country ; and in April, 
1229, he signed the treaty of Paris, by which he abdicated all 
his feudal sovereignty to the King of France, a small territory 
only being excepted as a dowry for his daughter, the heiress 
and last representative of his race. 

The unhappy father himself was conducted to the Church 
of Notre Dame, at Paris, and there underwent, from priestly 
hands, the same public and ignominious discipline which the 
sixth Raymond had endured at the Church of St. G-illes. 

Yet another woe, and the chronicle of these tribulations 
closes. In little more than six months from the cession of 
Languedoc, a council held at Toulouse established the Inqui- 



172 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

sition, for tlie conservation of the true faith and the punish- 
ment of heresy among the Languedocians. 

Grradually howing the neck to this foreign yoke and to this 
judicial despotism, they at length 'submitted to their fate. In 
the year 1242, Louis and Raymond YII. formally ratified the 
treaty of 1229, and the kings of France saw their domain ex- 
tended over all the Mediterranean shores, and along the fertile 
regions which connect the western declivities of the Alps with 
the eastern slopes of the Pyrenean range. 

The Church of the Alhigenses had heen drowned in blood. 
Those supposed heretics had been swept away from the soil of 
France. The rest of the Languedocian people had been over- 
whelmed with calamity, slaughter, and devastation. The es- 
timates transmitted to us of the numbers of the invaders and 
of the slain are such as almost surpass belief. We can neither 
verify nor correct them ; but we certainly know that, during 
a long succession of years, Languedoc had been invaded by 
armies more numerous than had ever before been brought to- 
gether in European warfare since the fall of the Roman empire. 
We know that these hosts were composed of men inflamed by 
bigotry and unrestrained by discipline ; that they had neither 
military pay nor magazines ; that they provided for all their 
wants by the sword, living at the expense of the country, and 
seizing at their pleasure both the harvests of the peasants and 
the merchandise of the citizens. More than three fourths of 
the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and 
castles. In hundreds of villages, every inhabitant had been 
massacred. There was scarcely a family of which some mem- 
ber had not fallen beneath the sword of De Montfort's soldiers, 
or been outraged by their brutality. Since the sack of Rome 
by the Yandals, the European world had never mourned over 
a national disaster so wide in its extent or so fearful in its 
character. 

Yet they by whom these crimes were committed were not 
demons, but men. They were children of our common father 
— members of the great human family to which we belong — - 
our very brethren — but brethren destitute of the advantages 
which we possess, and exposed to temptations from which we 
are exempt. In their actual guilt we have the measure of our 



THE ALBICtENSIAN CRUSADES. l73 

own possible criminality. As long as the records of our race 
shall exist, so long will De Montfort and his followers remain 
as a beacon admonishing mankind of the depth of the iniqui- 
ties into which they may be plunged by the indulgence of the 
spirit of fanaticism. 

Theirs was no common illusion. They could not perceive 
the deformity of their own evil passions, because they had been 
kindled by what they regarded as praiseworthy and. as holy 
purposes. Their rancorous hatred of a rival nation passed with 
them for patriotism. Their extermination of an heretical peo- 
ple appeared to them but as the outbreak of a devout zeal. 
They persuaded themselves that they were securing the divine 
favor by habitually violating the most sacred of the divine com- 
mands. They thought that they were ripening for the beat- 
itudes of heaven by doing on earth the very work of hell, i 
They knew not, or heeded not, the canon which requires us, 
on all questions of duty, to try our conclusions, not less than' 
our premises, by the law of our Creator. They blindly pur- 
sued to all its most revolting consequences a solitary and ill- 
apprehended principle, trampling down in their progress every 
other conflicting principle which God has written in his word, 
or has inscribed in the hearts of his rational creatures. 

In that word, for the warning of mankind in all ages, in- 
spired historians and prophets have traced and interpreted the 
connection which subsisted between the offenses of the chosen 
people and the calamities which from time to time over- 
whelmed them. No such voice has been raised to solve the 
corresponding enigmas of the history of the world in modern 
times. But the march of a retributive providence among men 
has not really been arrested. That our world rose into being 
by the volition of an omnipotent Creator, is scarcely more evi- 
dent than that the events of it are controlled by the wisdom 
of an omniscient Ruler. Reverently to trace out his steps by 
the lights which He has himself afforded us is no presumptu- 
ous attempt. It is assuredly not the least important of the 
ends which a wise man proposes to himself in reviewing the 
annals of our race. Such judgments, indeed, it is not permit- 
ted to us to form with regard to particular men, because their 
responsibility reaches beyond the grave. The indignation 
which swells the bosom against the leaders of the Albigensian 



174 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

Crusades is suLdued by the remembrance that their sentence 
is with their judge. But we may more safely decipher the 
scroll of Providence in its dealings with communities or na- 
tions, whose corporate existence is confined within the narrow 
precincts of this sublunary state. The abhorrence with which 
we contemplate the conduct of the powers and populations who 
carried on these atrocious wars, -and the satisfaction with which 
we regard their righteous punishment, are feelings which we 
may reasonably indulge. 

The fearful visitation fell, indeed, with the most withering 
severity on the Proven^aux themselves. The flood swept away 
the princely house to which their allegiance had so long been 
rendered, and with it their national independence, their civic 
franchises, their commercial prosperity, their gallant chivalry, 
their tournaments, their courts of love, their minstrels, and 
their troubadours. The tabret, the viol, and the lute were no 
longer in their feasts. The voluptuous dance was ended. 
Wealth was no more tributary to the refinements of art, nor 
art to the embellishment of social life among them. They 
hung up their harps, and sat down and wept over the departed 
glories of their native land. If, when those glories were in 
their noontide splendor, there had arisen up among them a 
seer, gifted by his knowledge of the annals of mankind to di- 
vine the approaching dispensations of the Supreme Ptuler of 
men, he would assuredly have foretold the coming desolation. 
He would have remembered that neither in sacred nor in pro- 
fane history — neither in the monarchies of the East, nor in 
the free commonwealths of the Western world — neither in 
Egyptian, G-recian, Roman, Italian, Saracenic, or any other 
chronicles, could an exception be found to the law which dooms 
to ruin any people who, abandoning the duties for the delights 
of this tra,nsitory state, live only in the frivolities of life, and 
find only the means of a dissolute and emasculate self-indulg- 
ence in G-od's best gifts to man — in wealth, and leisure, and 
society — in erudition, and art, and science — in literature, and 
philosophy, and eloquence — in the domestic affections which 
should bless our existence — and in the worship by which it 
should be consecrated. From the voluptuousness of the intel- 
lect, the transition has ever been short and certain to the tyran- 
ny of the appetites. They to whom the education of the young 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 170 

is intrusted will seldom be unobservant or unconscious of this 
danger ; nor in our own land and age will they, I trust, ever 
be wanting in efforts to counteract it. Among the many titles 
of this our own illustrious seat of learning to our reverence 
and our love, there are few, if any, higher than the resistance 
she opposes to all luxurious trifling with the great subjects of 
her academical instruction, and the habitual elevation of her 
standards of excellence to heights which can be scaled only by 
men of lofty purposes and of strenuous self-denial. 

But in the ruin of that rich and self-indulgent people fell 
also those who had raised the earliest protest which modern 
Europe has heard against the superstitions, the errors, and the 
spiritual despotism of Papal Rome. Their fate may, perhaps, 
seem to raise a more perplexing problem. The natural regret 
that the Reformation was thus postponed till after the lapse 
of three more centuries of mental darkness, may possibly not 
be quite unmixed with surprise that such should have been 
the decree, or such the permission, of the Divine Providence. 
But " the Holy Church throughout all the world" has ever con- 
templated the sufferings of her noble army of martyrs, not 
with repining, but with gratitude and exultation. In implicit 
faith she has ever committed the times and the seasons to Him 
to whom alone their maturity can be known. Yet even to our 
contracted vision it is evident that, without a miraculous change 
in the whole economy of the world, and in the entire system 
of human life, the reformation of the Church could not have 
been successfully accomplished by the ministry of the Albi- 
genses. The mind of man had not as yet passed through the 
indispensable preliminary education. The Scholastic philoso- 
phy, extravagant as may have been some of its premises and 
some of its purposes, had yet a great task to accomplish — the 
task of training the instructors of the Church in the athletic 
use of all their mental faculties. Philology, and criticism, and 
ecclesiastical antiquity, were still uncultivated. The Holy 
Scriptures, in their original tongues, were almost a sealed vol- 
ume to the scholars of the West. The vernacular lansfuasfes 
of Europe were unformed. The arts of printing and of paper 
making were undiscovered. Such an age could neither have 
produced or appreciated a Wickliffe or a Huss. Still less could 
Melancthon, or Luther, or Calvin, or Beza have borne their 



176 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

fruit in such times, if such men had then been living. Above 
all, the world, as it then was, could no more have fostered 
minds like those of Cranmer or Ridley, of Jewell or Hooker, 
than it could have trained up chemists to rival Cavendish, or 
mechanists to anticipate Watt. If the Albigenses had suc- 
ceeded in their designs — if they had reclaimed the nations 
from the errors of Rome, they must infallibly have substituted 
for her despotism an anarchy breaking loose from all restraints, 
divine and human — an anarchy far exceeding, in presumptu- 
ous ignorance and audacious self-will, the wildest of the sects 
which perplexed and disgraced the Reformation of the six- 
teenth century. 

That despotism had then reached its noontide splendor, 
and, bewildered by the infatuation of that giddy height, was 
about to fulfill an immutable law of human society, by rapidly 
falling from it. The Papacy had risen to more than imperial 
power. It had attained a dignity eclipsing that of the proud- 
est of the Csesars. It enjoyed a wealth which could be emu- 
lated only in the fabuloas East. To avenge the assassination 
of her legate Castelnau, to assert her own insulted majesty, 
and to arrest the growing revolt of mankind from her author- 
ity, she had desolated the fairest regions of France by every 
plague which tyranny can inflict, or which the victims of it 
can undergo. Blinded by revenge, by haughtiness, and by 
fear, she forgot that, by crushing the Proven^aux, she was 
raising up to herself an antagonist with whom she could 
neither live in peace nor contend on equal terms. Scarcely 
had the Church of Rome brought the great province of Lan- 
guedoc under the allegiance of the King of France, when he 
promulgated the Pragmatic Sanction, which established what 
have ever since been called the " liberties of the Grallican 
Church." During the two succeeding centuries the bishops 
of Rome had to sustain, from the successors of St. Louis, a 
series of indignities fatal to their moral influence, and a suc- 
cession of open hostilities which menaced the entire destruc- 
tion of their political power. In the person of Boniface VIII, 
the Papacy was compelled, by Philippe le Bel, to drink deeply 
of the cup of humiliation which it had so often mixed for the 
secular powers of Europe. From 1305 to 1377 the Popes 
were little more than vassals of the French monarchs at Avig- 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 177 

non ; and from that time till 1417, the Papacy itself was rent 
asunder by the great schism. The edifice of their greatness 
then received at Constance, Basil, and Pisa those rude shocks 
under which the Reformation of the sixteenth century found 
it still trembling. From the days of Hildebrand to the end 
of the war against the Albigenses, the dominion of the Papacy 
had been progressively acquiring -consistency and strength. 
From the end of that war to the days of Luther, it was pro- 
gressively losing its hold on the affections and reverence of 
the world. It crushed a feeble antagonist in Raymond and 
his house, but it raised up irresistible adversaries in Louis IX. 
and his successors. It exiled from Languedoc all the Wal- 
denses who escaped the sword, but it drove them to testify 
through every part of Christendom against the cruelties, the 
superstitions, and the errors of their persecutors. It silenced 
the open avowal of dissent from the creeds and the pretensions 
of Rome, but it sent to the utmost limits of Europe men 
whose hearts burned with an unquenchable indignation against 
her falsehoods and her tyranny. As was her crime, such was 
her punishment. 

In that crime the barons and the commonalty of France 
were the chief agents ; but in the perpetration of it, they 
were also the destroyers of their own personal, political, and 
social privileges. The dominions of the Count of Toulouse 
and of the King of Arragon, north of the Pyrenees, were add- 
ed to the French crown immediately after the conquest by 
Philippe Auguste of the continental dominions of the sons of 
our Henry II. The coasts of the Mediterranean and the At- 
lantic simultaneously acknowledged the sovereignty of the 
Capetian race. Strong in this great accession of power, they 
rapidly overthrew the Feudal Confederation, at whose cost 
and by whose arms they had acquired it. The great, but now 
helpless Feudatories were subjected by Louis IX. to the judi- 
cial supremacy of the crown. Philippe le Bel imposed on 
them those fiscal burdens which soon ripened into legal dues. 
The consequent substitution of hired armies for the military 
service of the feudal vassals completed the extinction of the 
baronial power. The fall of it commenced with the improv- 
ident and short-sighted animosity, national and religious, 
which, thirsting for the extermination of a rival people, ele- 

M 



178 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

vated over the conquerors themselves an irresponsible domes- 
tic tyranny. They were the eager executioners of the mur- 
derous decrees of Rome against the Albigenses, and thus he- 
came the suicidal destroyers of their own fortunes, powers, 
and independence. They grievously abused the trust com- 
mitted to them by the Supreme Ruler of the world, and, by 
his equitable retribution, that abuse was rendered the instru- 
ment of their own ruin. 

The kings of France regarded the destruction of the counts 
and other feudal lords of Languedoc and Provence first with 
indifference, and then with complacency ; for the more pow- 
erful of them were Arragonese, and not French subjects, and 
the allegiance to the crown of France which the Count of 
Toulouse acknowledged was at best equivocal and precarious. 
When the war at length finally transferred all those great fiefs 
to St. Louis, that prince, upright and magnanimous as he 
was, could not but exult in so vast an increase of the domin- 
ion which he was to transmit to his posterity. That augment- 
ed power conducted them, it is true, to a despotism, which, 
without it, they could probably never have attained. But if 
some prophetic intimation could have disclosed to St. Louis 
the long succession of woes which both the sovereigns and the 
people of France were to reap from that despotic authority, 
his exultation would have been checked by that fearful pros- 
pect, and his piety would have deprecated a gift at once so 
brilliant and so calamitous, 

I have neither found nor sought the guidance of philosophy, 
moral or political, in this brief attempt to trace out the retrib- 
utive march of Providence in this melancholy episode of the 
history of France. I have been dwelling on truths familiar to 
the youngest of my hearers, and famihar, it may be, even to 
satiety. Perhaps I have been encroaching on the province of 
those from whom, and from whom alone, it is the common 
duty and privilege of us all in this place to receive any public 
lessons on the obligations which religion inculcates, or on the 
doctrines which she reveals. If so, I hope to be forgiven an 
error mto which I have been almost irresistibly drawn, and 
which I am not likely to repeat. But having to address my- 
self to many who did not see the first dawn of life till long 
after I had reached the meridian of it, I have been unable to 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES, ^, 179 

decline the opportunity whioli this hasty review of the Crusade 
against the Albigenses has afforded me, of reminding them of 
a truth as weighty as it is familiar. It is the truth that, in 
the whole system of human affairs, " the Lord Grod omnipo- 
tent reigneth ;" that our free will is the inevitahle, because 
it is the appointed minister of the Divine will ; that to render 
that ministration cheerfully and with a ready mind is our 
highest attainable good ; and that to render it in opposition to 
our desires and purposes is too often at once our unhappy 
doom and our well-merited punishment. 

The modern science of Sociology, however, entirely rejects 
and overrules this, or any similar interpretation of the sequen- 
ces of historical events. If it be conceivable that any accident 
has this morning brought into this Hall any one of the doctors 
of that school, I shall have been provoking, and must endure 
the contempt in which it is their habit so largely to indulge 
toward those who are less " advanced" than themselves. They 
divide their fellow-men into two classes, to one of which — ^the 
Sociologists — they appropriate the distinctive name of "think- 
ers," leaving to the rest their choice of any title which shall 
exclude and negative that enviable designation. The dissent 
from their doctrines of any one who does not sociologize — that 
is, who does not " think" — must of course, therefore, appear 
to them utterly unimportant, whether his voice be raised in 
the university of Francis Bacon, or in the academies of Tim- 
buctoo. Now, although the superciliousness of men of genius 
may occasionally expose them to some dislike, they are always 
safe from retaliation. No man unarmed with the triple brass 
of ignorance, of presumption, and of self-conceit, would sup- 
pose himself entitled to speak, or to think lightly of a science 
invented by M. Comte, expounded by Mr. Mill, and adopted 
and illustrated by Mr. G-rote. It is with profound respect for 
those great names, and with a corresponding anxiety for my 
own credit in dissenting from them, that I request your atten- 
tion to the motives which have forbidden me to enlist under 
their banners. And, first, let us endeavor to ascertain what 
this new doctrine really is. 

M. Comte, as translated ^or interpreted by Mr. Mill, informs 
us that, " on every subject of human inquiry, speculation has 
three successive stages ; in the first of wliich it tends to explain 



180 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

the phenomena by supernatural agencies ; in the second, hy 
metaphysical abstractions ; and in the third or final stage, con- 
fines itself to ascertaining their laws of succession or simili- 
tude." Those conclusions at which man arrives in his third, 
or final stage of the progress of his inquiries, are designated as 
"positive," in contradistinction from those speculative or hy- 
pothetical views to which alone man can attain in his road 
thither. By thus pointing out the way of ascent to the "posi- 
tive," M. Comte and his disciples have, as we are farther in- 
formed, " let in a flood of light upon the whole course of his- 
tory." 

It much concerns us, therefore, in all our historical inqui- 
ries, to know Avhat the " positive" really is, and to learn how 
we may ascertain, by means of it, " the laws of succession 
and similitude," as they obtain among the political or social 
occurrences of the world through which we are passing. For 
our assistance in those inquiries, Mr. Mill has supplied us with 
some comprehensive canons. 

First. We learn that " all phenomena of society are phe- 
nomena of human nature, generated by the action of outward 
circumstances upon the mass of human beings." 

Secondly. We are instructed that, as the phenomena of 
human thought, feeling, and action are subject to fixed laws, 
the phenomena of society also can not but conform to fixed 
laws, the consequences of the preceding. 

Thirdly. The reason why the operation of the fixed laws 
of human nature on man as a member of society can not be 
ascertained with absolute precision, or announced with perfect 
confidence, is, it appears, not that the laws themselves are fluc- 
tuating, but that the circumstances under which they act are 
indefinitely numerous, complicated, and dissimilar. The as- 
tronomer can predict coming sidereal events with certainty, 
because he reasons upon fixed laws and upon but few data. 
The Sociologist can pronounce no such political predictions, not 
because the laws of his science are unfixed, btit because the 
multitude of the causes to be taken into his account disturb 
and defeat all his calculations. But, though he can not attain 
to an amount and distinctness of knowledge sufficient to make 
him a prophet, he may, we are told, attain to knowledge enough 
to make him a trustworthy guide. It may, therefore, be in- 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 181 

teresting to you to know, that it is "a notion current among 
the more advanced thinkers" that, under such guidance, we 
may " proceed, on Baconian principles," to " look forward into 
the history of the human race, and to determine what artificial 
means may he used to accelerate the natural progress, as far 
as it is beneficial, and to compensate for whatever may be its 
inherent inconveniences or disadvantages." 

It appears, however, that " Baconian principles," when 
grasped at by the unskillful or the unwary, are apt to conduct 
them, not to the terra firma of sound knowledge, but to the 
fog-banks of empiricism. Some, as we are admonished, wish 
to deal with the history of the past, in order to infer from it 
the events of the future, as the chemist deals with the sub- 
stances in his retort or crucible. But such inquirers forget 
that they can make no artificial experiments on society like 
those to which he subjects his metals or gases. They can not 
interrogate nature as he does. They can reason only from in- 
stances presenting themselves spontaneously ; and no two such 
instances make any such approach to identity as to enable the 
Sociologist to ascertain from the comparison of them what are 
the real and active causes of the similarity or the dissimilari- 
ty of the results which he observes. 

The Baconian investigator, as we are farther reminded, will 
not less surely lose his trouble if he applies himself to his task 
in the spirit of a mechanical philosopher, when calculating the 
lines which will be described on any given area by a body im- 
pelled in certain directions by one or more known forces, 
whether opposed or unopposed by counteracting forces of the 
same kind. For example, he will miss his way if he shall as- 
sume the existence of any " universal precepts," according to 
the breach or observance of which will be the future develop- 
ment of the fortunes of any people. Or if he should undertake 
to divine what is about to happen from the accordance, or the 
want of accordance, of the members of any commonwealth 
to any theory of human society — such as that of an original 
contract — ^his divinations will be nothing worth. Neither will 
he speculate with any truth or plausibility on coming events, 
if he proceeds on the hypothesis that any social polity is actu- 
ated by some solitary principle, whether, according to Hobbes, 
that principle be fear, or whether, according to Bentham, it be 



182 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

the desire which animates every man to the pursuit of what he 
esteems as his highest private and worldly interests. All these 
are merely empirical or conjectural laws, not the laws of na- 
ture, which are identical with the laws of human society. 
They are but so many vain attempts to compress the infinite 
variations of things, as they really exist, within the narrow 
grasp of a premature and gratuitous generalization. 

How, then, are we to rise to the region of the "positive," 
and thence to survey the approaching future ? That great task, 
as we learn, is to be accomphshed by the use of what, in the 
logical style, is called " the concrete deductive method." The 
Sociologist studies the nature of man. He investigates human 
motives, psychological and ethological. He examines the tend- 
encies of such motives as they are in themselves. He exam- 
ines those tendencies as they have actually manifested them- 
selves in social life. Having thus studied the nature of man, 
of his motives, and of his past history, he next informs him- 
self of the actual condition of any given state of human soci- 
ety. He then applies himself to estimate and anticipate the 
probable results of any contemplated measure on that state of 
society, as such results may be expected to flow from the work- 
ing of those motives the tendencies of which he has so studied. 
He does not, however, rush to any premature conclusion as to 
any such anticipated results. Awaiting the actual catastro- 
phe, he observes how far there is any real "consilience" be- 
tween his expectation and the event. If there be no such agree- 
ment between them, he modestly infers that there was some 
fatal error either in his reasoning or in the premises on which 
he reasoned. But if there be the anticipated " consilience," 
then he rejoices in the consciousness of having grasped one of 
those positive laws according to which the earlier of two given 
states of society produces the later state, which succeeds to it 
and takes its place. 

Now if, as I believe, this is substantially an accurate ac- 
count of the system of historical inquiry which is distinguished 
from all others as the "positive," it seems to me to provoke 
some censures, which not even the profound respect I have 
most sincerely avowed for its most eminent patrons will in- 
duce me to suppress. 

First, then, one is constrained to marvel at the zeal which 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 183 

celebrates the discovery of that system in such lavish terms 
of applause. Instead of being inclosed within the royal do- 
main of science, for the use and glory of a little knot of philos- 
ophers, might it not as well have been left, where assuredly it 
was found, in the open fields of speculation, for the behoof of 
all who have right of common there ? There were brave men 
before Agamemnon ; and a countless host of " thinkers" about 
history were making use of the " concrete deductive method" 
before the appearance of M. Comte to inculcate, or of Mr. Mill 
to explain, the practice of it. We have not far to look for ex- 
amples. Open any speculative treatise on government, from 
the days of Aristotle to those of Montesquieu, and you will find 
iimumerable instances of that modest wisdom wliich advises 
the adaptation of the measures of the law-giver to the general 
tendencies of human motives, and which suggests a careful 
inquiry into the actual coincidence of the theory and the re- 
sult. Take down any one, at hazard, of the ponderous vol- 
umes of our statutes at large, and you will find our English 
legislators declaring it expedient to frame one enactment after 
another, by each of which they at least designed to introduce 
such innovations as, according to the supposed tendencies of 
men's nature, would, as they believed, produce beneficial ef- 
fects on the social state of the people of England. Nay, in 
many of those statutes, our Parliament (speaking prose with- 
out being aware of it) made the operation of the new law tem- 
porary and experimental, that, before they advanced farther, 
they might see how far there was any real " consilience" be- 
tween their expectation and the event. It is one thing to in- 
terpret, another to invent. He who first interpreted the law ac- 
cording to which arches sustain a vast superincumbent weight, 
did good service ; but he was not the inventor of the arch. 
That praise belonged to the stone-mason. M. Comte may be the 
first didactic writer about the "positive ;" but it was among 
the most established of all intellectual crafts Ions before he 
arose to take his seat on the dialectic throne. 

The " positive" system of historical investigation is, there- 
fore (as it seems to me), far more important on account of 
what it interdicts than on account of what it prescribes. But 
its prohibitions rest on a basis which itself demands no little 
support. For, ^ 



184 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

Secondly, it may readily he admitted that all tlie phenome- 
na of human thought, feeling, and action are subject to fixed 
laws ; and, if so, it may consequently be admitted that all the 
phenomena of society must conform to such laws ; for law and 
order are of the very essence of Him in whom, collectively as 
well as individually, we live, and move, and have our being. , 
But it is not readily admitted that the chief difficulty of fore- 
telling the operation of those laws in any particular cases re- 
sults from the vast number and the endless variety of the cir- 
cumstances and the aspects under which the members of any 
society are always acting, and must at any given time be con- 
templated. The difficulty is, in my own judgment, far more 
to be ascribed to our inability to ascertain what many of the 
most important of the laws of our common nature actually are. 

In the words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, " There be four 
things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding 
wise. The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their 
meat in the summer. The conies are but a feeble folk, yet 
they make their houses in the rocks. The locusts have no 
king, yet they go forth all of them by bands. The spider tak- 
eth hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces." If we 
study the polity of any of these " exceeding wise" people, we 
can attain to a prophetic vision of their course of conduct in 
any conceivable contingencies of their respective common- 
wealths. The almighty Author of their being has laid bare 
to our inspection the laws by which it is governed, and we cal- 
culate with certainty on the operation of them. Has any such 
disclosure been made to men of the laws which govern them- 
selves collectively, or to any individual man of the laws by 
which he himself is governed ? 

What is this ceaseless and almost irresistible influence of 
our material organism upon the soul, which thinks, and feels, 
and wills within us ? What is this fatal predominance of the 
worthless present over the inestimable future ? What mean 
and whence come all these gradations from the phrensy of the 
maniac to the absolute mental health of the most gifted of the 
children of men ? Whence and what is this strange inequal- 
ity and contrariety between different men ? What is this ante- 
natal predestination, which confers on one, and denies to anoth- 
er, the facility for every attainment, and the aptitude for every 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 185 

virtue ? What is this transmission, in almost each particular 
family, from one generation to another, of peculiar gifts, mor- 
al and intellectual, and of corresponding responsibilities, with 
their attendant rewards or punishments ? And yet why do 
two children, twins of the same womh, inmates of the same 
home, and pupils of the same preceptors, occasionally exhibit, 
from the cradle, moral and intellectual characters as dissimilar 
as their physical structure is alike ? What is life, and what 
is death? When these questions, and such as these, are re- 
solved, then we may boast our knowledge of the laws of hu- 
man nature, but not till then. But, 

Thirdly ; though not knowing those laws sufficiently for 
prediction, may we not know them enough for guidance ? I 
answer, that if it had really pleased the Author of our exist- 
ence to make onr Reason the sole guide of our conduct, then 
that which our Reason infers from the observation of life 
would doubtless afford a sufficient rule of our conduct. But 
such is not the condition of our mortal being. The first, the 
most impressive, and the most frequent of the lessons of our 
individual Reason is, that we are in the presence of teachers 
of higher authority than herself. Humility is her appropriate 
handmaid ; and to bow down our own judgment to the judg- 
ments of those who are wiser than We, or in lawful command 
over us, is her daily and hourly precept. 

If there were not at hand redundant proofs from experience 
that such are the terms on which we live, simple Theism 
would assure us of it. It can not be that He who has so stu- 
diously provided for the conservation of the meanest member 
of His animated creation, should have left us to pursue our 
path through the dangers, temptations, and intricacies of our 
moral and social life, with no readier or surer aid than is to be 
derived from the slow and precarious process of " concrete de- 
duction." If from simple Theism we pass to revealed religion, 
the assurance that we have many such readier and surer aids 
is explicit and unambiguous. But, 

Fourthly ; "all the phenomena of society being generated 
by the action of outward circumstances upon the mass of hu- 
man beings," why may we not calculate beforehand on the 
recurrence or appearance of those phenomena by a careful es- 
timate of the force and tendencies of those outward oircum- 



186 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

stances ? I answer by denying that all the phenomena of so- 
ciety are thus generated. I refer the great number and the 
more important of those phenomena, not to the action of any 
outward circumstances, hut to the antagonistic influences of 
those two internal principles to which theology gives the names 
of Natural Corruption and of Divine Grrace. Now what hu- 
man prescience can make the right allowance for such influ- 
ences as these on individual man, and therefore on collective 
man, that is, on Human Society ? Regarding the corruption 
of our nature, we are hidden to believe that " the Heart of 
man is deceitful above all things," and to inquire, "Who can 
know it ?" Regarding the influence of the Divine G-race, we 
are taught that, " like the wind, it bloweth where it listeth, 
but that no man can say whence it cometh or whither it 
goeth." 

Fifthly ; this, however, is petitio principii. I am assum- 
ing the truth of Christianity, and that truth is neither admit- 
ted nor denied by Sociology, but passed by in studied silence. 
As one of the " less advanced," I regard that silence as a just 
subject of serious complaint. Christianity may be (as we be- 
lieve) the greatest of all truths, or it may be (as some have 
maintained) the gi'eatest of all falsehoods. But that it should 
be true, and yet irrelevant to any system of social science, is 
utterly inconceivable. That the teachers of any such science 
should think themselves at liberty to abstain from so much as 
one passing allusion to it, is therefore, at least, very marvelous. 

For Christianity at least claims to answer many of the most 
intricate and arduous of their inquiries. It claims to supply 
us with some of those "universal precepts," against which, 
as guides on such subjects. Sociology has given us her most 
emphatic warning. Are these claims ill founded ? If so, let 
their futility be unambiguously asserted and plainly exposed ; 
for, if they are indeed fallacious, it is a fallacy diffused over 
a far greater multitude, and casting far deeper roots, than any 
of those errors with which the " positive" has hitherto wrestled. 

I anticipate the answer. No man is really free among us 
to avow his disbelief of the religion of his age and country ; 
nay, hardly of any one of the commonly received articles of it. 
"With whatever seriousness, decorum, and integrity of purpose 
such an avowal may be made, he who makes it must sustain 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 187 

the full force of all those penalties, civil and social, which more 
or less attend upon all dissent, or supposed dissent, from the 
recognized standard of orthodoxy. I acknowledge and lament 
that this is so. I think that they who inflict such penalties 
are entitled to no praise and to no gratitude. They give to 
disbelief a motive and an apology for a dishonest self-conceal- 
ment. They give to the believing a painful mistrust that there 
may possibly be existing, and yet concealed, some potent rea- 
sons which, if men could speak their minds with real impu- 
nity, would be alleged against their own most cherished con- 
victions. No infidel ever did, or can do, so much prejudice to 
our faith as has been done by those zealous adherents of it 
who labor so strenuously, and so often with such unfortunate 
success, to terrify all objectors into silence. The early Chris- 
tians were but too successful in destroying all the writings of 
the early infidels. Yet, for the confirmation of our faith in 
the present age, a complete copy of Celsus would be of far 
more value than the whole of the volumes of Origen. 

I, therefore, should not venture to condemn, much as I might 
regret, the silent passing over by Sociologists of any reference 
to the scriptural solutions of so many social problems, even if 
I were entitled (as I am not) or disposed (which I am still 
less) to ascribe that silence to a real, though unavowed rejec- 
tion by any of them of the authority of what Christians regard 
as an inspired canon. But, be the reason of their taciturnity 
what it may, it at least leaves those who do acknowledge in 
that canon the voice of a more than human wisdom, unre- 
buked in their attempts to draw from it other lessons than 
those which the " positive" has to teach, or than those which 
the " concrete deductive method" can discover. 

Sixthly ; in reliance, therefore, upon that canon, I venture 
to think that, when we speculate on the phenomena of human 
society, it is not a mark of infantine weakness, but is rather 
the indication of the maturity of our strength to seek the solu- 
tion of them by referring to " supernatural agencies." Sure 
at least I am, that from the Pentateuch to the Apocalypse 
those phenomena are thus interpreted. Such, beyond all dis- 
pute, is the unbroken tenor of the writings of all and of each 
of the prophets. It is utterly impossible to reconcile those 
writings with the doctrine that he who would foretell the in- 



188 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 

fiuence on any society of any contemplated measure, has to 
embrace only two elements in his calculation : the one, the 
laws of human nature ; the other, the circumstances in which 
the society in question is placed. A third and yet more mo- 
mentous element is invariably introduced in the intimations 
of Holy Scripture, That element is the nature of Him with 
whom we have to do, so far as He has been pleased to make 
His nature known to us. 

Seventhly ; I do not think that any student of the Bible 
wiU be able to adjust the language of it to the dogma that 
we are not at liberty to assume the existence of any " uni- 
versal precepts," according to the breach or the observance of 
which will be the future development of the fortunes of any 
people. If this be, indeed, one of the dictates of the modern 
social science, then is that science in the most direct and ab- 
solute conflict with the dictates of what we accept and rever- 
ence as the Word of G-od. Every sentence of that "Word lays 
down, or refers to, some " universal precepts," the sanctions 
of which, so far as communities of men are concerned, are 
either their temporal welfare or their temporal misery. 

Finally, Whoever shall attempt to interpret the past se- 
quences of human history, or to anticipate those which are 
still'to come, if he shall make that attempt by the aid of such 
lights as he can derive from revelation, must make a large 
allowance for one consideration, which Sociology entirely over- 
looks. I refer to the doctrine of a particular providence. 

I can not conceive that any man whose mind is deeply im- 
bued with scriptural studies, and especially with the study of 
the historical and prophetical scriptures, should also adopt that 
philosophy of our times which transfers to the movements of 
the human will, and to the consequent condition of the mem- 
bers of the human family, laws borrowed from the statics and 
the dynamics of mechanical science. The language of the 
Bible is, doubtless, to a great extent, rhetorical and poetical ; 
but, after making every possible deduction from its precise lit- 
eral meaning on that ground, there still remains in it an over- 
whelming weight of concurring testimony to the fact that 
what may be called the natural sequences of events in the af- 
fairs of men are continually broken by the Divine interposition. 
Every where, and in every conceivable variety of expression, 



THE ALBIGEIVSIAN CRUSADES, 189 

we meet, for example, with assertions and illustrations of the 
fact that God is continually raising up individual men, who, 
from their peculiar characters, are designed and made to serve 
as pivots, upon which the whole circuit of human affairs is to 
revolve. It is superfluous to quote from the sacred storj'' ex- 
amples so familiar to us all of these divine dispensations. Take 
an instance far more near to our own times. Suppose a Soci- 
ologist — a very long-lived one indeed — studious of the nature 
of man, and of the tendencies of his motives of action, to have 
contemplated the circumstances of human society as they ex- 
isted in England in the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
and as they existed in France in the middle of the eighteenth. 
He might, in either case, have foreseen an approaching increase 
of popular franchises at the expense of monarchical preroga- 
tives. But it would have been utterly beyond his power to 
foresee that the English throne would be filled by a prince 
distinguished for stubborn audacity, and that the throne of 
France would be filled by a prince not less distinguished by 
timid irresolution. Yet on those their personal characters, 
every thing was in reality to depend. If Charles and Louis 
had changed places, there would have been a reform in either 
country, but a revolution in neither. The Supreme Disposer 
of events, and He alone, could foresee, that in that crisis of 
the history of each of those states, the moral temperament of 
an individual man would work out such results. But, fore- 
seeing it. His particular providence ordained that the crown 
should, in either case, be worn by such a man as was neces- 
sary for bringing about the predestined catastrophe. 

In thus adhering to the revealed Word of Grod — not, indeed, 
to supersede the social science, but continually to control its 
authority, to supply its deficiencies and correct its errors — we 
are, of course, subject to that kind and degree of liability to 
mistake which we incur in receiving Holy Scripture as the 
authentic disclosure to man of the will and the dealings of his 
Creator. If, in so receiving Holy Scripture, we are really mis- 
taken, let the error be distinctly pointed out, and, if possible, 
established. But by merely pretermitting the subject, our 
teachers point out nothing, and establish nothing respecting it. 
Unaided by them, we must therefore needs cling to our bap- 
tismal faith and to the confessions of our maturer years, and 



190 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

in that faith reverently attempt to gather from our Bibles a 
higher and a surer social science than we can derive from any 
other source. 

In that spirit I have, in the commencement of the present 
lecture, attempted to indicate the providential results of the 
war of the Albigenses. For the long sequel which I have thus 
added to that inquiry, my apology must he found in the hound- 
less importance of the subject to which it refers. Among the 
most profound reasoners, and the most learned writers of our 
times, are to be found those from whose vital principles on the 
subject of historical investigation I am thus constrained to dis- 
sent. I have not gone out of my way to create an opportunity 
of encountering such opponents. No man of common prudence 
would do so. But neither have I turned aside from the path 
before me to avoid that encounter. No man of common in- 
tegrity would consult his ease and credit by so abandoning, in 
deference to any names however great, or any genius however 
eminent, that which he supposes to be the cause of truth. 



LECTURE VIII. 

ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF 

FRANCE, 

We are now to inquire Vow far the elevation of the Mon- 
archy of France, at the expense of the Feudal Confederation, 
was promoted by the System established for the administra- 
tion of Justice in that kingdom. 

The reign of Louis IX. is memorable as the era at which 
the French kings first assumed that legislative power, and the 
French Parliaments that judicial power, which they respect- 
ively retained till toward the close of the eighteenth century. 
The nature, the causes, and the effects of these innovations, and 
especially of the last, must, therefore, be embraced in our pres- 
ent inquiry. But at the very entrance into it the eye is ir- 
resistibly arrested by the monument v/hich the learned and 
the wise of every age, subsequent to his own, have concurred 
in raising to the illustrious author of them. In that long suc- 
cession of eulogists on the Royal Saint, none have been more 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 191 

emphatic than Hume, and none more enthusiastic than Vol- 
taire. Yet it was impossible, even to then* subtle intellects, 
as it has been difficult to many students in a far nobler school 
than theirs, to trace the movements of that benignant Provi- 
dence which planted and brought to a prolifio maturity in the 
mind of Louis, as in a genial soil, the seeds of an habitual 
holiness, and of a wisdom which, if not always unclouded, 
was so often at once elevated and profound. It is perhaps an 
enigma refusing any complete solution. Yet the more dili- 
gently his life is studied, the more distinctly will it, I think, 
appear, that his natural dispositions received from the associ- 
ates and the teachers of his youth the trainmg which rendered 
them fruitful of so many virtues. Exquisitely alive to every 
domestic affection — -often oppressed by a constitutional melan- 
choly, which laid bare to him the illusions of life, yet occa- 
sionally animated by a constitutional gayety, which enabled 
him for a while to cherish and to play with those illusions — 
enamored of the beautiful, and revering the sublime — his tem- 
per, though thus sympathetic, pensive, and imaginative, was 
allied (it is no common alliance) to a courage which rose and 
exulted in the presence of danger, and to a fortitude which was 
unshaken in the lowest depths of calamity. Yet his genius 
was more imitative than original, his spirit ductile rather than 
decisive, and his whole character not self-sustained, but des- 
tined to derive its ultimate form and color from the habits, the 
tastes, and the opinions of those with whom he might be as- 
sociated. 

G-reat, therefore, were the obligations of Louis to the com- 
panions and guardians of his youth. His mother, Blanche of 
Castile, watched over the royal boy (for he had not completed 
his thirteenth year when he ascended the throne of France) 
v\'ith all a mother's tenderness, united to a discipline more in- 
flexible, and perhaps more stern, than most fathers have the 
courage to exercise. Li Isabella of France, his sister, who had 
preferred the cloister to the imperial crown, he had another 
kinswoman who bestowed on him all the thoughts, the time, 
and the affection which she ventured to divert from the object 
of her almost ceaseless worship. In his eighteenth year he 
married Marguerite of Provence, who, after having been the 
idol of the Troubadours of her native land, herself became 



192 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

almost an idolater of him, cleaving to him with the same con- 
stancy of love in their quiet home at Poissy, and amid his dis- 
asters at Massourah and Damietta. 

But the sagacity of Blanche foresaw that these filial, frater- 
nal, and conjugal affections might enervate, even while they 
purified, the spirit of her son, and she therefore selected for his 
tutor a man possessing, as she judged, the qualifications hest 
adapted to counteract that danger. His name was Pacifico. 
He was an Italian gentleman, who, having been one of the 
first followers of St. Francis of Assisi, was animated by the 
profound and fervent devotion which characterized his master. 
From Pacifico, Louis derived those religious convictions which 
thenceforward formed the basis of his whole exterior and in- 
terior life. So deeply, indeed, were those devout habits in- 
wrought into his mind, that the desire to abdicate his crown 
and to assume the monastic vows attended him to the last. 
Nor was this a mere day-dream ; for, when occasion offered, 
he would for a while adopt the dark tunic of the Mendicants, 
and pass whole days in the performance of theu- sacred offices. 

But Pacifico was too wise a man to train up a king in the 
spirit and practices of a monk. He instructed his pupil in 
ancient and in more recent history, caused him to ride boldly 
in the chase, and required him to cultivate every martial ex- 
ercise and courtly grace, which was then regarded as indis- 
pensable in a gentleman and a cavalier. Nor did the lowliness 
of the Franciscan institute prevent the friar from instilling 
into the soul of Louis the loftiest conceptions of his own royal 
dignity. The noblest of his falcons, it is said, having attack- 
ed and slain an eagle, was welcomed with rapturous applause 
by his brother sportsmen, but was dismissed from all farther 
service by the royal boy, with the indignant remark that he 
should not have presumed to pounce on the monarch of the 
skies. 

Other and far different associates contributed to form the 
character of the pupil of Pacifico. In the halls of the Louvre, 
then a fortress rather than a palace, veteran captains described 
to him the battles which they had fought with Saladin, and 
the victories which had expelled the English from Normandy. 
Beneath the same royal roof, gray-headed counselors of Phil- 
ippe Auguste explained to him the methods by which that 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 193 

prince had enlarged the domains and the powers of the kings 
of France ; and there also civic bailiffs and provincial senes- 
chals interpreted to their young sovereign the motives which 
had induced his ancestors to increase the number and to ex- 
tend the franchises of the communes. Thus imbibing from 
aged men the hereditary maxims of his house, he learned to 
adopt them as the laws by which his future reign was to be 
directed. 

But the yet higher laws by which his own personal conduct 
was to be governed seem to have been derived from a far 
more eminent teacher than any of these. St. Thomas Aquinas, 
who had migrated from his native Italy into Northern France, 
was passing there a life which may be said to have been one 
deep and unintermitted meditation ; for the results of which 
he found utterance sometimes in acts of public or of solitary 
worship, and at other times in interpreting to mankind the 
mysteries and the duties of their relations to the Deity and to 
each other. To the inquiry of Bonaventura as to the sources 
of his stupendous learning, he answered by pointing to the 
crucifix which stood upon his table ; and, when seated at the 
table of the king, or introduced into his closet, he still direct- 
ed him to the same inexhaustible fountain of divine and hu- 
man wisdom. From his intercourse with St. Thomas, Louis 
seems to have acquired his acquaintance with that science 
which the devout Pacifico could not have taught — the sacred 
science of Christian morality, in all the amplitude and in all 
the minuteness of its application to the offices of a legislator 
and a king. 

Though contrasted with this seraphic doctor as strongly as 
the Chronique de St. Louis is contrasted with the Summa 
TheologisB, the Sire de Joinville had his lessons also to im- 
part to his sovereign. Joinville, the grand seneschal of Cham- 
pagne, was the living impersonation of the beau ideal of 
his age — the preux chevalier — the mirror of courtesy — con- 
cealing a tender heart beneath a stoical demeanor — rejoicing 
in all the good things of life, while braving death and pain in 
all their ghastliest forms — clinging to his religion as a point 
of honor, and guarding his honor as a religious obligation — 
the most loyal of vassals, the most frank and plain-spoken of 
courtiers ; and writing with so much natural vivacity and 

N 



/y- 



194 THE INFLUENCE OP THE JUDICIAL ON 

ease, that the ordinary authorship even of the times of Mon- 
taigne is rebuked by the great essayist himself, as constrained 
and artificial when compared to that of the gallant chronicler. 
To Joinviile more than to any one else Louis was probably in- 
debted for the cordiality, the graoiousness, and the freedom of 
address which, in his case, may be said to have risen into a 
virtue, since without it his other virtues would have lost much 
of their influence. No other writer has depicted the Royal 
Saint, and perhaps no other ever saw him, in his moments of 
social exhilaration ; nor are there many stories more charming 
than those in which the good seneschal describes himself as 
amusing his devout sovereign, at one time by provoking the 
orthodox anger of Robert, the chanter of Cambray, and at an- 
other by dragging into daylight the superfine linen concealed 
beneath his cassock ; so hearty is the pleasure of the honest 
narrator at having made a luxurious monk ridiculous, and so 
graceful the kindness with which the king soothes the pain of 
the mortified priest at the expense of the thicker skinned 
soldier. 

But I anticipate and bow to the censure, that we have not 
met here this morning to recreate ourselves with facetious 
tales, however dignified may have been the heroes of them ; 
and I therefore desist from the farther prosecution of a favor- 
ite theme. But even this slight sketch of the formation of the 
character of St. Louis will not be altogether useless if it shall 
induce any of my hearers to study the writers, and Jqin3d.lle 
above all the rest, to whom we are indebted for our knowledge 
of him ; for St. Louis occupies in history a place apart from 
that of all the other moral heroes of our race. It is his pe- 
culiar praise to have combined in his own person the virtues 
which aie apparently the most incompatible with each other, 
and with the state and trials of a king. Seated on the noblest 
of the thi'ones of Europe, and justly jealous of his high prerog- 
atives, ho was as meek and gentle as if he had been undistin- 
guished from the meanest of his brethren of mankind. En- 
dowed from his boyhood, by the lavish bounties of nature, with 
rank, M'^ealth, power, health, and personal beauty, he was as 
compassionate as if sorrow had been his daily companion from 
his youth. An enthusiast in music, architecture, and polite 
learning, he applied himself to all the details of public busi- 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 195 

ness with the assiduity of one who had no other means of sub- 
sistence. Though glowing with all the ardor of an Homeric 
hero on the field of battle, he purchased and maintained peace 
by sacrifices which might have appeared humiliating to the 
faintest heart which ever throbbed beneath the diadem. Sur- 
passed by no monarch in modern Europe in the munificence 
of his bounties or in the splendor of his public works, those 
purest and most Sumptuous of the luxuries of royalty were in 
no single instance defrayed from any tributes levied from his 
people. Passionately attached to his kindred, he never en- 
riched or exalted one of them at the public expense. Regard- 
ing the aggrandizement of the crown by the subjection of the 
greater feudatories, as a king in all times, and as a patriot in 
his times must have regarded that policy, he yet respected 
their legal rights, not only with rigid justice, but even with 
the most delicate and generous courtesy. The heir of con- 
quests and territorial acquisitions of which the responsibility 
rested with his grandfather, the inestimable advantage with 
himself, he restored to his rivals and his adversaries every fief 
and province which, upon the strictest scrutiny by the most 
impartial umpires, appeared to have been added to the royal 
domain by unjust, or even by questionable means. "With a 
soul knit to the Church, and entirely devoted to her real in- 
terests, he opposed a firmer resistance and a more enduring 
barrier to sacerdotal rapacity and ambition than had been con- 
templated by the most audacious and worldly-minded of his 
predecessors. 

What, then, was the basis of this sacred harmony in the char- 
acter of Louis ? I answer, or rather every page of his history 
answers, that it flowed from his constant devotion to that holy 
canon, and to that divine model, in which every utterance and 
every action are harmonious. His eye was continually turned 
to the eternal fountain of light with all the docility of child^ 
hood. He had early attained to that maturity of the moral 
stature in which the abdication of self-will to the supreme will 
becomes at once a habit and a delight. In the service of his 
Creator he found and enjoyed a perfect freedom. It was a 
service often rendered in pain, in toil, in sickness, and in dan- 
ger, but ever rendered with a heart full of cheerfulness, and 
confidence, and hope. It was a life illustrious neither by any 



196 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

extraordinary talents nor by any brilliant acliievements, but 
by virtues which the humblest may emulate, and by disposi- 
tions which may gladden the meanest cottage, and ennoble the 
least powerful understanding. But I must add that it was 
also a life scarcely less fertile in warning than in example. In 
blind obedience to human authority, supposed to be divine, 
,^ Louis, abandoning the duties of a king for those of a crusader, 
led to destruction in Egypt and at Tunis the two most gallant 
armies which France had ever sent into the field. In defer- 
ence to an unfounded scruple of conscience, he surrendered to 
the Plantagenets territories which laid open France to the wars 
under which she gi-oaned during several successive generations. 
With the most simple purpose of fulfilling what he supposed 
to be the will of God, he laid the foundations of the absolute 
powers, judicial and legislative, by which his successors on the 
French throne crushed successively the feudal powers of the 
seigneurs and the constitutional franchise of their people. To 
explain and justify this last statement is the object which I 
more immediately propose to myself in the present lecture ; a 
subject too technical and tedious to be rendered interesting to 
any but the resolute students of history, yet too important to 
be passed over by any excepting those with whom study is but 
another name for pastime. 

In the Feudal age, the whole of France was divided into 
seio"norial fiefs and enfranchised municipalities. In every fief 
the seigneur exercised an hereditary jurisdiction, both civil 
and penal. According to the language of those times, the jus- 
tice of each seigneur was either Haute, Moyenne, or Basse — 
a gradation depending on the extent of the damages, and on 
the nature of the penalties which his court was competent to 
award. 

Every enfranchised municipality also possessed a local tri- 
bunal, which, within the corporate limits, administered jus- 
tice, either Haute, Moyenne, or Basse, according to the terms 
of the traditional privileges, or of the charter of enfranchise- 
ment of each. 

In the Seignorial Court, the seigneur himself presided, his 

vassals attending him as judicial assessors. They were called 

peers ; the equals, that is, those who were to come before them 

f in judgment ; for the principle that no man could be tried ex- 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 197 

cept by his peers was as ancient and as fully established in ( 
France as in England. 

Of all the fiefs of the realm, the greatest was that of which 
the king himself was the immediate seigneur. It was called 
the Royal Domain. The Feudal Court of the Eoyal Domain 
resembled that of the other seigneuries, except that it was 
holden, not by the king in person, but by his Seneschal as his 
representative. 

The seignorial courts could take cognizance only of cases 
arising out of feudal rights or feudal obligations ; for it was in 
respect of such cases alone that the vassals of the fief stood in 
the relation of peers to the suitors in those tribunals. To pro- 
vide for the decision of judicial questions arising within the 
royal domain, but not falling within the range of the feudal 
law and jurisprudence, the king appointed there other judges, 
called Prevots. 

Toward the end of the twelfth century, the progressive en- 
largement of the royal domain had rendered the courts of the 
seneschal and prevots inadequate to the discharge of their ap- 
propriate duties. The progressive increase of the royal au- 
thority had also, at that period, attracted to the crown many 
petitions for the redress of grievances, and especially of griev- 
ances arising from the abuse of the powers, both of the king's 
greater feudatories and of his inferior officers. To meet these 
new exigencies, therefore, the king reverted to one of the Car- 
lovingian institutions. He appointed missi dominici, or mi- 
gratory commissioners, to perform circuits through his domain, 
and there to adjudicate on matters to which the ordinary courts 
were either inadequate or incompetent. Those commissioners 
soon became permanent judges, under the name of Baillis. 
Those circuits soon became determinate and well-defined dis- 
tricts, under the name of Bailliages. 

Beyond the limits of the royal domain, the competency of 
the baillis extended, first, to all cases of haute justice, arising 
within any fief or municipality, the seigneur or corporation of 
which did not themselves possess that high jurisdiction ; sec- 
ondly, to what were called cas royaux, that is, all cases in 
which the rights of the king, as suzerain of the whole realm, 
might be drawn into question ; and, thirdly, to cases of appeal, 
that is, to cases in which a suitor (as the phrase was) faussoit 



198 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

Jugeme?it, hj denouncing the judge of tlie seignorial or muni- 
cipal court, or any witness there, as false, fraudulent, and 
perjured, and hj demanding wager of battle against him. 

The introduction by the king of a seneschal, of prevots, and 
of baillis into the judicial system of the royal domain, awak- 
ened the jealousy of the great vassals of the French crown. 
Emulous of the power of their sovereign, and as yet little dis- 
posed to ascribe to him any superiority to themselves, except 
in rank, those grandees imitated his example by appointing, 
in their several fiefs also, seneschals, prevots, and baillis. The 
resemblance was, indeed, imperfect. The royal baillis could, 
as has just been noticed, take cognizance of many questions 
arising beyond the precincts of the royal domain. The seign- 
orial baillis, on the other hand, could take cognizance of no 
question arising beyond the precincts of the particular fief for 
which they acted. Nevertheless, these imitations conduced to 
an important result. As one great fief after another was sue 
oessively absorbed into the royal domain, the uniformity which 
had thus been previously effected in their legal institutions 
reconciled the change to the habits and feelings of the inhab- 
itants. The political union of all the fiefs of the kingdom was 
preceded and facilitated by this correspondence between the 
judicial systems of them all. 

The reign of Louis IX. was, as I have said, a most mo- 
"^ mentous era in the history of the French law and of the French 
tribunals. I had lately occasion to explain how, in conse- 
quence of the Eastern Crusades, the Eoman jurisprudence be- 
came a favorite study in the universities of Italy and France. 
In that code the thoughtful men of those times discovered the 
means of providing for the great exigency of their age— that 
is, for an equitable, systematic, and uniform administration of 
justice. Their earlier studies as divines and canonists enabled 
them not only to appreciate the importance of that discovery, 
but also to turn it to the best account. To those clerical law- 
yers France was accordingly indebted, first, for compilations 
of the legal customs of the several greater provinces of the 
kingdom, such as Burgundy, Champagne, Normandy, and 
Anjou ; secondly, for treatises explanatory of those customs, 
among which those of Beaumanoir and De Fontaines were the 
most celebrated ; thirdly, for essays toward the consolidation 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 199 

of them all into one general code, to be called " Consuetudines 
Patriae ;" and, finally, for the actual preparation of one such 
code, which, under the title of Etablissements de Saint Louis, 
was promulgated by that monarch in the year 1270. It was 
a body of law regulating the mode of procedure in all feudal 
oases, and illustrated by comments and analogies drawn from 
the Corpus Juris Civilis. Though originally confined to the 
royal domain, the Etablissements were ere long extended to 
the whole of France, and are among the earliest examples of 
any law having so extensive a scope and operation under the 
Capetian Dynasty. 

Science having thus been introduced into legislation, it be- 
came indispensable in the judgment-seat also. The rude bar- 
on and his martial assessors had not encountered much diffi- 
culty in adjudicating in the seignorial courts. "When engaged 
in inquiries too subtle for the prompt award of an untutored 
common sense, they tried the point at issue between the liti- 
gants by an appeal to the Omniscient Judge. That appeal 
was supposed to be made either by the ordeal or by mortal 
combat, and the result of it was not to be mistaken by the 
least learned of the spectators. But to the devout and enlight- 
ened mind of St. Louis, it appeared irreverent and profane 
thus to invoke the miraculous intervention of the Deity on an 
occasion on which no divine promise had given assurance of 
any such aid. Though addressed in words and form to the 
Omniscient Judge, that appeal was, as he perceived, really 
made in reliance on the personal prowess of the appellant, and 
was effectual only to the strong and the rich, at the expense 
of the feeble and the poor. For these reasons, St. Louis, in 
the year 1260, promulgated an ordinance forbidding the resort 
to that species of judicial proof within the limits of the royal 
domain. , 

Deprived of the martial test on which they had hitherto re- 
lied, the courts of every seigneur within the domain were com- 
pelled to resort to those more delicate criteria of truth which 
are afforded by the language of the litigants, and by their evi- 
dence, whether oral or documentary. It thus became neces- 
sary to ascertain, in all such cases, what were the facts alleged, 
admitted, or denied by the respective disputants ; what were 
the precise matters of fact or points of law controverted be- 



200 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

tween tliem ; what, as to any such matter of fact, was tlie 
balance of conflicting testimonies ; and what, as to any such 
points of law, were the legal rules or customs according to 
which they must he decided. 

Thus the stout haron and his vassals had no longer to pre- 
side at judicial combats, but at judicial processes — a change 
most unwelcome and embarrassing to judges, most of whom 
were unable to read. They had to listen to prolix and con- 
tentious suitors contradicting the assertions, refuting the ar- 
guments, impugning the witnesses, and repelling the proofs of 
each other. Advocates and proctors quoted to them the newly- 
discovered Institutes of Justinian, which those learned persons 
were already accustomed to call "the perfection of wisdom." 
Partly from its inherent merits, and partly from the absence 
of any rational system of jurisprudence of native or of Euro- 
pean origin, this code of the Eastern empire soon attained a 
great authority, and at length took possession of all the tri- 
bunals of France. As it gradually substituted the written de- 
positions of witnesses for their oral testimony, it enhanced the 
difficulties of the seigneurs in their administration of justice, 
by adding another stratum of obscure and wearisome docu- 
ments to the vast deposits of that kind beneath which they 
were already overwhelmed. The fatigued and perplexed bar- 
onage had but one resource left to them. It was that of ad- 
mitting to the audience some of those who were called " lit- 
erate" persons, and of chargmg them with the care of unravel- 
ing the interminable web of written controversy. Beneath 
the stately sedilia of the lord and his chief vassals were there- 
fore placed a range of low stools, on which were seated men 
of modest, quiet, and submissive demeanor — clerks in or out 
of holy orders, as it might happen — roturiers of base birth, and 
not seldom of mean pursuits, yet curiously gifted with the art 
of methodizing, digesting, and explaining those formidable 
piles of legal instruments. A discerning eye might have traced 
in the calm and pallid looks of the drudges who dispatched 
these toils, some suppressed scorn for the unlettered superiors 
at whose feet they sat, not unmixed, probably, with some as- 
piring hopes that ere long those stately seats might be their 
own. 

That such hopes were cherished may be well conjectured 



I 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 201 

from the fact that they were speedily fulfilled. Ere long, the 
literate assessors fairly (or perhaps unfairly) wore out the pa- 
tience of the illiterate barons. To listen to an incomprehen- 
sible legal jargon day after day, through long hours due to 
the raid, the tournament, or the chase, had been provocation 
enough. But to discover, at the close of every such tedious 
session, that those mean men in serge gowns and black bon- 
nets really dictated, while affecting only to suggest the decis- 
ions of the court, and were making passive tools of the seign- 
eurs who had believed that they were about to make tools of 
them, was too much for baronial endurance. Exhausted with 
unprofitable fatigue, and exasperated with the irretrievable 
loss of all their real importance and dignity as judges, the 
lords first became remiss in their attendance, and at last en- 
tirely abandoned the tribunal to the humble, but shrewd and 
painstaking clerks. In due time they exchanged their low 
stools for the vacant bench, and obtained or assumed a title 
more commensurate with the real importance of their office. 
Becoming at length the recognized judges of the soignorial 
court, they thenceforward indulged themselves without re- 
straint or hinderance in all the legal subtleties to which they 
owed their elevation. 

By means not dissimilar, a corresponding victory was gain- 
ed by the lettered clerks over the unlettered barons of those 
fiefs which lay beyond the limits of the royal domain. I have 
already observed that, in every part of France, the royal baillis 
could take cognizance, first, of cases of haute justice arising 
within any fief, the seigneur of which did not himself possess 
that high jurisdiction ; secondly, of cas royaux, that is, of 
cases in which the rights of the king as suzerain might be 
drawn into question ; and, thii'dly, of appeals, that is, of cases 
in which a witness, being accused of perjury, or a judge of 
willful injustice, battle was waged against either of them. 

Now the baillis of the royal courts beyond the royal domain, 
bemg chosen by St. Louis on the ground of their education 
and knowledge as lawyers, were, like all other members of 
that profession, ardent admirers and followers of precedent and 
of ancient authority. Like the " literate" assessors of the bar- 
ons within the royal domam, and in imitation of them, the 
royal baillis began, in all cases arising beyond the limits of 



202 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

that domain, to study and to quote the Institutes of Justinian 
and the Pandects ; nor had they ever to seek there in vain for 
analogies by which to enlarge the judicial powers which they 
exercised in the name of their sovereign ; for, 

First. Observing that every imperial rescript had been bind- 
ina: and in force throughout all the limits of the Eoman em- 
pire, they maintained that every sentence pronounced in the 
courts of the King of France must be binding and in force in 
every part of the French kingdom. 

Secondly. Having learned that the emperor had been ac- 
customed to withdraw from all local tribunals to his own those 
causes which were called Causae Majestatis, they taught that, 
by parity of reason, the king was entitled to evoke all the cas 
royaux from the seignorial to the royal courts. And as the 
emperor had left the words " causae majestatis" in a certain 
flexible indistinctness of meaning, so they held that it was not 
necessary (as to the king it obviously was not desirable) to de- 
prive the words " cas royaux" of their convenient elasticity by 
any precise definition of them. They discovered (but little in- 
vention was requisite for such ,a discovery) that few cases 
could arise in a seignorial court which might not affect the 
king in his character of suzeram, and consequently there were 
few which might not be drawn within their own cognizance. 
Thus, continually enlarging his own sphere of action, the bailli 
as continually contracted that of the seignorial judges. 

Thu-dly. To multiply still farther the number of cas roy- 
aux, it became first a maxim, and then a law, that every free 
man who was a party in a legal process might, at his own 
pleasure, as it was expressed, " declare his domicile ;" that is, 
he might determine for himself whether, for the purpose of the 
suit, he should be considered as a liegeman of the baron on 
whose fief he was found, or as a liegeman of the king. If he 
made the latter choice (and there were many motives inducing 
him to make it), the king's judges claimed an exclusive cog- 
nizance of the matter in debate. 

Fourthly. The justice of the seigneurs was yet more con- 
siderably narrowed by another legal doctrine which was in- 
vented and enforced by the judges of the royal courts. As the 
ordinance of 1260, forbidding trial by battle, was confined to 
the royal domain, the judge of a seignorial court was still, in '. 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 203 

strictness of law, bound to vindicate his innocence by tlie 
sword, if a suitor brought an appeal of false (that is, of will- 
fully unjust) judgment against him in the court of the royal 
bailli. To avoid this consequence, the baillis discovered or un- 
veiled the doctrine that, even beyond the royal domain, the 
ordinance of 1260 was, by a certain analogy, to be adopted as 
the rule of judgment of all royal courts. Therefore, when a 
suitor in any part of France brought an appeal of false judg- 
ment against the judge, the bailli did not require the judge ap- 
pealed against to enter into a combat with his accuser, but 
they required the accuser to prove by arguments, or by evi- 
dence, that his judgment was opposed to the principles of just- 
ice. Now this was, in effect, to receive from the seignorial 
courts ajjpeals, in the strict and proper sense of the word. 
Any unsuccessful suitor in any such court, who, in form and 
in terms, impugned before the bailli the integrity of the orig- 
inal judge, was thus enabled to obtain a rehearing and a new 
decision of the cause. Thus the court of the seigneur at 
length became, in effect, nothing more than a tribunal de 
premiere instance ; a mere outer chamber, in which the pro- 
cess was prepared for the final adjudication of the royal 
judges. 

Finally. As the imperial code had determined that Rome 
was communis patria of all Roman citizens, so the royal baillis 
drew from it the analogy and conclusion that all the subjects 
of the King of France had their communis patria at Paris, 
and were amenable to the jurisdiction of the Parisian tri- 
bunals. 

To any one conversant with the history of the law of En- 
gland, we might seem to be recounting some of the triumphs 
of the courts at Westminster in elbowing out all the rival ju- 
risdictions, in enlarging their own, and in confounding the 
function of the interpreter of the lavr with that of the law- 
giver ; for, amid all the specific distinctions between the legal 
tribunals of different countries, they have a great sameness of 
generic character. Their natural tendency every where is 
toward uniformity of judicial procedure, toward concentration 
of judicial power, and toward a well-defined subordination of 
all the successive ranks of the judicial hierarchy to each other. 
They are taught by a sure instinct that union is strength, and 



204 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

that such mutual dependence and submission are essential to 
union. 

To complete the chain of subordination by which that hier- 
archy was to be constituted and bound together, a new system 
of tribunals arose at the commencement of the fourteenth cen- 
tury, which were destined ultimately to control, and in a great 
mLcasure to supersede, all the other courts of justice in France. 
I refer to the Parliaments, and especially to the Parliament of 
Paris, In order to explain what at length became the judicial 
character and functions of these tribunals, it is necessary to 
return upon some of the steps which we have already taken, 
and to endeavor, however briefly, to have their genealogy from 
much more ancient institutions. 

I attempted in a former lecture to justify the statement, 
that, from the invasion of Clovis to the accession of Charle- 
magne, France did not possess any national Legislature, nor 
even any royal legislator. That part of the old Romano-Gral- 
lic race which dwelt in cities, continued in those times to live 
under their old municipal government, but had no share in 
any national affairs. That part of the same race which lived 
in the rural districts as slaves or serfs, or as coloni, took just 
as little part in the conduct of the general interests of Graul as 
the oxen which drew their plows. The Franks, on the other 
hand, constituted one great army, the main body of which 
was encamped round the abode of their Kyning or commander, 
and the rest of which was broken up into various detachments, 
stationed at great distances from each other, on the lands and 
among the slaves appropriated for their maintenance. Every 
such detachment became ere long a sedentary tribe, and the 
chief of each was accustomed, as occasion required, to convene 
the mallum (that is, an assembly of the free inhabitants) of 
his district, to deliberate with him on all the affairs of his im- 
mediate locality. The Kyning also occasionally convened an 
assembly of the whole of the P'rankish chiefs, to deliberate 
with him at the Champs de Mars on the affairs of the whole 
confederacy. But neither the mallum nor the Champs de 
Mars was a legislative convention. Each of them was a coun- 
cil of war or an assembly of warriors, who, brandishing their 
swords and clattering their shields, shouted their acquiescence 
or their dissent as their commander-in-chief laid before them 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF PRANCE. 205 

any military project ; very much after the manner of the 
Cherokees two centuries ago, or of the Foulahs of Central, or 
the Zooloos of Southern Africa at the present time. 

The assemblies even of Charlemagne, and of his sons and 
grandsons, were little more than so many Frankish palavers, 
brought together to discuss any military questions of unusual 
difficulty or importance. The admission of the episcopal order 
gave to them, indeed, an additional character strongly resem- 
bling that of Synods ; and the large views of Charlemagne 
himself, and of his wise and learned counselors, sometimes in- 
duced him to borrow from such assemblages a higher sanction 
for his capitularies than they would have had if avowedly rest- 
ing on his own unaided authority. But whatever use he, or 
his immediate descendants, may occasionally have made of 
these armed or clerical conventions, it is a mere abuse of words 
to designate them as national Legislatures. 

"When the Carlovingian Monarchy had given place, first to 
Anarchy and then to Feudalism, the mallums, and the Champs 
de Mai, and (except in some southern cities) the municipal 
ourise also disappeared. But in their stead there came into 
existence the feudal courts. Each tenant in capite of the 
crown held within his fief a Parliament of his own free vas- 
sals. To attend at such Parliaments was among the most im- 
portant of the conditions on which the vassal held his lands or 
his offices. He was as strictly bound to be present at his lord's 
pleas in court, as to follow his lord's banner in the field. 

For at such pleas or courts were done most of the acts by 
which the lord asserted and perpetuated his seignorial rights. 
There was administered the seigneur's justice, whether haute, 
moyenne, or basse. There were discussed all questions im- 
mediately affecting the seigneurie or the tenants of it. There 
especially were adopted all general regulations which the ex- 
igencies of the lordship were supposed to dictate, and especially 
all such as related to the raising failles or other imposts. 

What was thus done on a small scale in a minor fief, was 
also dons, though on a larger scale, in each of the feudal prov- 
inces, and on a scale yet more extensive in the court or Par- 
liament holden by the king as a seigneur of the royal domain. 
In that high assembly justice was administered by the king 
to the feudatories of the domain and to their vassals. There 



206 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

were discussed questions affecting the common weal of tlie 
king, and of all his tenants in capite throughout the realm. 
There also were proposed or promulgated such general regu- 
lations as the exigencies of the king or of any parts of his 
kingdom were supposed to require ; and there especially was 
determined whatever related to the raising of failles, or im- 
posts, for the king's service, in any part of his dominions. 

This royal court or Parliament was, however, not a Legisla- 
ture in our modern sense of that word. It was rather a con- 
vention, in which, by a voluntary compact between the king 
as supreme suzerain and the greater seigneurs as his feudato- 
ries, an ordonnance or an impost was established either through- 
out the entire kingdom, or in some seigneuries apart from the 
rest. From any such compact any seigneur might dissent on 
behalf of himself and his immediate vassals, or, by simply ab- 
senting himself, might render the extension of it to his own 
fief impossible. 

This system of holding royal courts or Parliaments was of 
gradual and tardy growth. It can, indeed, scarcely be traced 
at all in the four first Capetian reigns. But in the time of 
Louis YII. it received a new impulse and importance from a 
cause which never before or since exercised so striking an in- 
fluence over human affairs. The British Arthur of the ballads 
of that age had sat at his round table encircled by his twelve 
knights, and the Troubadours and Minnesingers had therefore 
assigned to Charlemagne (the hero of their romances) an equal 
number of paladins. Bards have, in all times, had the high 
office of predicting the future. In mediseval France, as in an- 
cient Greece, they attained to the additional prerogative of 
divining, or rather of creating the past, Louis VII. believed, 
or affected to believe, in Turpin, and in his traditions of Ro- 
land, Oliver, and Tristan ; and, in real or pretended deference 
to them, he actually sLimmoned to his royal Parliament, with 
the rank and title of Peers of France, six of the chief ecclesi- 
astical, and as many of the principal lay seigneurs of his realm. 

The romance thus became a reality. The fiction passed into 
a truth. In the dramatic spirit which enters into the very life 
of the French people, Louis VII. and each in turn of his suc- 
cessors delighted to enact the role of Charlemagne, while 
each of these great princes, secular or ecclesiastical, gladly 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 207 

and ostentatiously assumed the charaoter of a peer and pala- 
din. Many generations had passed away before those peers had 
entirely ceased to be regarded as a distinct order in the state, 
and as the lieutenants and chief counselors of their sovereign. 
As, however, they did not form a separate body, but sat and 
deliberated with the other chief feudatories in the feudal Par- 
liament of the kmg, they enhanced, instead of impairing, the 
authority of his great council or royal Parliament. 

Subject to the many corrections which would be requisite 
to reduce to perfect accuracy this slight sketch of the origin 
of the great council or Parliament of the kings of France, such 
was, in substance, the constitution of it at the time of the ac- 
cession of Louis IX. Before the close of his eventful reign, 
that monarch had aoquked the character, and was in full ex- 
ercise of the powers, of a law-giver, and v/as habitually mak- 
ing laws, not with the advice and consent of his council or 
Parliament, but in the exercise of the inherent prerogative 
which even they now began to ascribe to the French crown. 

I have already observed, that under the Feudal System, 
each tenant in capite of the crown held within his fief a Par- 
liament of his own free vassals, at which were adopted such 
general regulations as the exigencies of the seigneurie were 
supposed to dictate, and especially all such as related to the 
raising imposts ; and that, when it was judged necessary to 
establish any such regulations or imposts throughout the whole 
kingdom, the king and his chief feudatories adopted them at 
the royal court or Parliament, rather as international compacts 
than as legislative enactments, in our sense of those words. 

But in the reign of St. Louis new maxims began to prevail. 
In the Roman code, the royal judges found an inexhaustible 
magazine of weapons with which to assail the feudal, and to 
defend or enlarge the royal power. The wisdom of the pro- 
prietary laws of Rome, and the equity of much even of her 
penal laws, afforded at once an apology and a disguise for the 
silent introduction into France of much also of her political 
law. Yet it was a law which had been molded into its later 
forms in an Oriental seraglio, and which was fit onl}'^ for the 
government of a debased and servile population. The inherent 
powers of the French crown were assumed by the king, and 
asserted by the judges, to be co-ordinate with those of the 



208 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

Byzantine Diadem. As the Emperor of the East had been ac- 
customed to issue rescripts at his pleasure, so it was main- 
tained, cautiously at first, but confidently at length, that the 
King of France was also entitled, in the exercise of his royal 
authority, to make such enactments as he might think neces- 
sary. As the Crusaders had placed a French prince on the 
throne of the East, so the East was now avenged by placing 
an absolute power in the hands of the kings who afterward 
sat upon the throne of France. 

These encroachments, however, scarcely attracted ths atten- 
tion, or, at least, they did not provoke the jealousy, of the no- 
bles of that warlike and improvident age ; nor did any mon- 
arch ever disarm suspicion by a nobler apology for the enlarge- 
ment of his own powers, than that which St. Louis derived from 
the wise and generous uses to which he devoted them. 

Thus, for example, the feudal seigneurs and their clans, like 
some of the barbarous tribes of Australia in our own times, re- 
garded the responsibility for bloodshed as extending to the re- 
motest kindred of the man-slayer, and as descending from gen- 
eration to generation. They therefore, like those tribes, or 
like our old Scottish clans, waged against each other wars of 
alternate, and therefore of interminable vengeance. Louis IX., 
in the exercise of his assumed character of a law-giver, pub- 
lished an ordinance interdicting all such private wars. The 
wisdom and the advantage of it were so evident, that the ille- 
gality of it was unheeded or forgotten. 

Thus, also, the court of Rome always claimed and often ex- 
ercised three invidious and formidable secular powers. These 
were, first, the power of nominating incumbents to benefices 
in derogation of the rights of private patrons ; secondly, the 
power of appointing the officers of cathedral churches without 
the consent, or against the will, of the bishops, deans, and chapr | 
ters ; and, thirdly, the power of levying imposts on the eccle- 
siastical revenues of France, without either the concurrence 
of the clergy or the permission of the king. Louis IX., with 
universal applause, interdicted all such papal encroachments 
by that celebrated law which was ever afterward designated 
as his Pragmatic Sanction. 

In these, as, indeed, in most of his assumptions of legislative 
power, St. Louis was, bp.yond all doubt, actuated by purposes 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 209 

as pure as his enactments tliemselves were "beneficial to his 
people. Yet a conspicuous place is due to him in the roll of 
princes, whose very virtues have been fatal to the states they 
governed ; who, in genuine but mistaken patriotism, have cast 
down ancient landmarks of inestimable, though unperceived 
value, and who have bequeathed to future times examples to 
be followed with equal readiness, though with most dissimilar 
motives, by the worst as well as by the best of their successors. 

The apology of having been guided only by public spirit and 
love of country will, however, not apply to the most remarka- 
ble of the assumptions which St. Louis made of the power of 
legislation. I refer to that code or body of laws already men- 
tioned, which bear the title of his Etablissements. It is a rude 
imitation of the Justinian Code, and is evidently the work of 
some practiced lawyer of that age, whose literary labors prob- 
ably attracted but little of the attention of the king, in whose 
name they were promulgated. This French Tribonian, who- 
ever he may have been, seems to have been deeply imbued 
with the spu'it of the legistes of his times. His work, though 
destitute of all methodical arrangement, is not Avithout proofs 
of a certain unity of design. That design was to elevate the 
royal at the expense of the baronial power ; to repress, at what- 
ever cost of human suffering, those crimes which Feudalism 
most readily sheltered ; to extend the authority of the Roman 
law by superseding in its favor the customary codes of the 
greater fiefs ; and to enlarge the powers of the legal profession 
by throwing over the administration of justice a veil impervi- 
ous to any eyes but theirs. 

Inconsiderate as were the peers and barons of France in the 
thirteenth century, they did not silently acquiesce in this last 
and greatest usurpation by St. Louis of the legislative office. 
But their opposition was vain ; for, first, the promulgation of 
the Etablissements was very nearly coincident in point of time 
with his departure for his last and fatal crusade to Tunis, when 
the thoughts of all men were agitated by interests much near- 
er and much dearer to them than those of constitutional priv- 
ileges. And, in the next place, the objections of the seigneurs 
appear to have been overruled by their legal colleagues in the 
royal court or Parliament. There is to be found in Beauma- 
noir, one of those jurists, an account of the distinction in vir- 





210 . THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

tue of which they vindicated the claims of their sovereign to 
legislative power. " One may not say," he writes, "that the 
king is of right the law-giver ; hut it is admitted that he may 
promulgate laws for the good of the realm ; and it is proper 
. to obey them, because we are bound to suppose them to result 
from a wisdom superior to that of other men." It is difficult 
to imagine any conclusion which might not be yoked to any 
premises by the master of such a logic as this. 

I have already stated that, at the commencement of the 
fourteenth century, the Parliament of Paris began to complete 
that chain of subordination by which the whole judicial hie- 
rarchy was to be constituted and bound together as a single 
and united body. But thus far I have been engaged in ex- 
plaining how, in the presence of that Parliament — that is, of 
the royal council (for the terms were then convertible) — Louis 
IX. accomplished the greatest of all additions to the hereditary 
prerogatives of his crown. With our English prepossessions, 
it is impossible to repress the wonder, and even the incredu- 
lity, with which we at first listen to the statement that the 
supreme judicial tribunal of the kingdom could be otherwise 
than the zealous and effectual antagonist of so momentous 
an encroachment. To explain this, it now becomes necessary 
_to resume the broken thread of our discourse, and to inquire 
how the royal council" or Parliament added a judicial authori- 
ty to their earlier and more appropriate functions, and what 
,was the precise nature of chat authority. 

On the departure of Philippe Auguste for the Holy Land, he 
had thought it necessary to provide for the decisK. V, during his 
absence, of such complaints as were in his days of.^n preferred 
;to the crown respe r^iiig the conduct of the royal Juicers, polit- 
ical or judicial. "W ith that view, he directed the queen-moth- 
er and the Archbishop of Rheims, as regents of the kingdom, to 
liold once in each year an assembly of the greater barons. ' This 
practice had become habitual by the time of Louis IX, For 
the confirmation and improvement of it, that monarch ordered 
that, before the day of any such assemblage, citations should 
be issued, commandmg the attendance, not, £s before, of the 
greater barons exclusively, but of twenty-four members of the 
joyal council or Parliament. Of those twenty- four, three only 
were to be gi'eat barons, three were to be bisliops, and the re- 



THE MOXARCIITCAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 211 

mainiiig eighteen were to be knights. But as these members 
of the royal council did not appear to St. Louis to possess all 
the qualifications requisite for the right discharge of the judi- 
cial office, he directed that thirty-seven other persons should be 
associated to them. Of those associates, seventeen were to be 
clerks in holy orders, and twenty legistes, that is, men bred to 
the study of the law. The functions assigned to the legistes 
was that of drawing up in proper form the decrees and other 
M'ritten acts of the collective body. 

To this body, when thus constituted, was given the distinct- 
ive title of the Parliament of Paris. If we search our own in- 
stitutions for an analogy to the Parliament of Paris as origin- 
ally established, that analogy would be best discovered in the 
Star Chamber of ancient times, or in the Judicial Committee 
of the Privy Council as it has existed since the Restoration ; 
for the members both of the English and of the French cham- 
bers acted at once as judges and as privy counselors, and com- 
posed at the same moment a council board and a court of jus- 
tice. For the twenty legistes of the Parliament of Paris, coun- 
terparts may be found in the Clerks of the Council in England. 

But the legistes did not long content themselves with that 
humble position. The barons, the bishops, and the knights of 
the Parliament of Paris were beset with difiiculties precisely 
similar to those which (as we have seen) had perplexed the 
judges of the seignorial courts. They were rescued from them 
by the same hazardous remedy. The conseiller clero, as he 
was called, brought with him to the Parliament the same 
humble aspect as that which the lettered clerk had brought to 
the baronial tribunes, as a veil to the, same aspiring ambition. 
He was alw^^ys a scholar, and usually; a;., churchrn an. He had 
been trained, probably at Bologna,' in , the study of the Roman 
law. He was an adept in-; conducting legal ' controversies 
through pll their devious stages to their legitimate close, and 
in deducing from those voluminous premises their just and 
logical conclusions. At first the barons, knights, and prelates 
listened, or seemed to listen, composedly to those sleep-com- 
pelling oracles, and pronounced, or seemed to pronounce, the 
sentences dictated to them. But ennui and ridicule (powers 
ever regarded in France with the liveliest abhorrence) proved 
in the Parliament of Paris a purge quite as effectual as that 



212 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

"wliicli Colonel Pride administered to the Englisli House of 
Commons. The conseiller clercs were soon left to themselves, 
in due time to found, and to enjoy, what began to be called 
La Noblesse de la Robe. 

Having thus assumed the government of the court, the le- 
gistes next proceeded to enlarge its jurisdiction. It had, as we 
have noticed, been at first convened merely to take cognizance 
of complaints preferred to the king against the misconduct of 
his officers, political or judicial. But legal astuteness could 
not long be confined within such narrow limits. 

The earliest recorded invention of the conseiller clercs was 
what, in the language of Westminster Hall, would be called 
the writ of com7nittimus . It was a royal license, which au- 
thorized a person complaining of a grievance cognizable in any 
of the royal courts, to overleap those ordinary jurisdictions, and 
to prefer his complaint to the Parliament at once. When this 
innovation had been firmly established, the legistes proceeded 
to promulgate the doctrine that, even without a special com- 
mittimus, all prelates were entitled to this privilege ; a right 
which, if I mistake not, was afterward admitted in favor of the 
greater barons also. And, lastly, the lawyers maintained that, 
the wrong decision of a judge being equally injurious to the 
suitor whether the error was willful or unintentional, the griev- 
ance must, in either case, be equally remediable by a Parlia- 
ment expressly convened for the redress of all grievances in- 
flicted on the king's subjects by his judicial officers. In other 
words, they established the rule that the court in which they 
served could entertain appeals, in the proper sense of that 
word, from all the other courts within the royal domain. 

By these astute constructions of the law, the Parliament 
had, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, become the 
supreme legal tribunal within the whole of that part of France 
which was at that time attached to the crown. In all the 
other parts of the kingdom, the seignorial courts retained the 
whole of their ancient jurisdiction, excepting only, Jirst, when 
suits were evoked from them to the royal courts, as cas royaux ; 
and, secondly/, when any such suits were brought, in the first 
instance, before the Parliament by the writ of committimus. 

Having thus enlarged the range of its jurisdiction, the Par- 
liament of Paris next advanced to the increase and consolida- 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 213 

tion of its powers. The measures taken with tliat view may 
be arranged under the nine following heads : 

First. With a view to that apportionment of duties which 
is essential to the combined and energetic action of the mem- 
bers of any corporate body, the Parliament was divided, in the 
reign of Philippe le Bel, into three chambers ; that is, the 
Chambre des Requetes, which took cognizance of all origmal 
suits ; the Chambre des Enquetes, where all appeals were pre- 
pared for adjudication ; and the Grreat Chamber, where such 
appeals were actually adjudicated. From this third chamber 
the legistes were, at this period, excluded. 

Secondly. The royal council had always been a migratory 
body, because it was always bound to attend the king in per- 
son. But, though the Parliament was (as has been seen), to a 
certain extent, identical with the royal council, it became se- 
dentary in the year 1319. From that time it met at Paris, 
and there only. 

Thirdly. In the reign of Philippe the Long, this identity or 
union of the royal council and of the Parliament was virtually, 
though not formally dissolved, and each of them thencefor- 
ward existed as a substantive and distinct body in the state. 
Every member of Parliament was then bound to a constant 
residence in Paris, except during the regular parliamentary 
vacations. I am aware of no proof that this innovation origi- 
nated with the legistes. But the case is probably so, because 
the effect of the change was immediately to elevate their own 
order to the supremacy which they ever afterward enjoyed in 
that tribunal. No prelate, except the Archbishop of Paris, 
could any longer retain his place there, for no other prelate 
could fix his permanent abode in the capital. For the same 
reason, the greater number of the most powerful of the baro- 
nial members became disqualified, and the lawyers thus found 
themselves in undisputed possession of the supreme court of 
justice in the royal domain. 

Fourthly. They sat there, originally, by the simple nomi- 
nation of the king, and during his pleasure ; but, as early as 
the year 1345, the practice was introduced of appointing the 
parliamentary counselors, as they were now called, for life. 
They received annual stipends, and their number was lim- 
ited. 



214 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

Fifthly. Ere long the crown made a yet farther concession 
in their favor. As vacancies on the bench occurred, candi- 
dates for the succession were proposed to the king by the re- 
maining counselors, and it became a settled practice to make 
the choice out of that list of candidates. This statement ap- 
plies only to the regular or stipendiary members. The num- 
ber of honorary members was unlimited, and usually included 
many persons of high rank. But in those days such persons, 
as a matter of course, absented themselves from the obscure 
labors of a judicial tribunal. 

Sixthly. Thus far the innovations in the character and 
composition of the Parliament of Paris were not ill adapted 
to secure the independence of the judges, and to invigorate 
their activity. But in the disastrous reign of Charles VI. oc- 
curred a change of a very different tendency. At that time a 
seat in the Parliament was converted from a tenure for life 
into an inheritance. The study of the law, with a view to 
the judicial administration of it, thenceforward became the 
exclusive patrimonial privilege of a certain number of families. 
A new order of nobility thus made its appearance. The mag- 
isterial noblesse asserted, if not an equality of rank, at least 
an equality of rights, with the feudal and military nobles. 
In the royal ordinances promulgated during two hundred years 
next succeeding the middle of the fourteenth century, may be 
traced the successive advances made by the parliamentary 
counselors toward these aristocratic privileges. Without paus- 
ing to enumerate the fiscal burdens from which they were thus 
exempted, it may be generally stated that they were at length 
delivered from all those which it was the peculiar fate and 
hardship of the roturiers to sustain. 

Seventhly. And as the counselors of the Parliament of 
Paris thus fortified their position, so they continually enlarged 
the range of their judicial authority. The writ of committi- 
mus was brought within the reach of suitors of low degree, 
instead of being denied, as at first, to all persons below episco- 
pal or noble rank. The appellate jurisdiction was extended to 
the decisions, not only of the university tribunals, but, in many 
cases, to those of the ecclesiastical courts also. Even the 
Chambre des Comptes was compelled to receive a certain num- 
ber of parliamentary counselors as their assessors in hearing 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 215 

complaints against their own judgments, from those public 
accountants whose receipts and payments were audited there. 

Eighthly. The Parliament, with more or less success, pro- 
ceeded to usurp some of the functions of the executive govern- 
ment. I do not, however, pause to recapitulate those attempts, 
because they were finally repressed by the strong hand of 
Charles YII. and his immediate successors. 

Ninthly. The establishment of the grand jours made a great 
accession to the more appropriate powers of the Parliament. 
By gi-and jours were meant assizes held, or commissions of in- 
quiry executed, by a certain number of the parliamentary 
counselors, at the great cities, within the local limits of their 
jurisdiction. The Ordonnance de Blois required that such as- 
sizes should be holden annually. But, in fact, they took place 
at uncertain and infrequent intervals. The parliamentary 
commissioners holding them were charged with duties not 
strictly judicial, but rather resembling those of the missi do- 
minici of Charlemagne, or those of the baillis of a later age. 
For example, they held inquests to ascertain whether the laws 
were properly observed, whether the officers of the crown 
were faithfully discharging their duties, and whether there 
were any public abuses demanding correction. Even toward 
the close of the eighteenth century such inquests were not 
entirely obsolete. 

While the Parliament was thus developing its powers and 
enlarging its privileges, three other judicial revolutions were 
in active though silent progress. The first was the gradual 
elevation of the royal courts of the baillis and prevots ; the 
second was the continual depression of the hereditary feudal 
jurisdictions ; the third was the growth of the provincial Par- 
liaments. 

First, like satellites obeying the impulse and pursuing the 
orbit of their central body, the royal courts followed the prog- 
ress of the Parliament to which they were subordinate. Thus, 
originally, the seneschals and baillis had been appointed by the 
king at his own discretion. But, in the sixteenth century, 
they were selected by the king from a list of candidates pre- 
sented to him by the Parliament. Thus, also, the baillis, 
though always seigneurs of high rank, and never professional 
lawyers, had originally been accustomed to preside in person 



216 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

in their own courts. But now they were first permitted, and 
then required, to execute their judicial functions by substitut- 
ing for themselves deputies learned in the law. Early in the 
sixteenth century, those learned deputies had entirely super- 
seded their unlearned principals on the judgment-seat ; and, 
when the courts of the baillis had received this new character, 
a royal edict of the year 1536 for the first time distinctly de- 
fined the range of their jurisdiction. With some exceptions, 
which I do not pause to enumerate, that jurisdiction was de- 
clared to extend over almost all questions, civil or criminal, 
of which the cognizance belongs to any secular tribunal, 
though subject, of course, to the appellate authority of the 
Parliament. 

The baillis, or deputy baillis, had always been aided by as- 
sessors or peers, or, as they might with little inaccuracy have 
been called, jurors, taken from the body of the people. But, 
in the sixteenth century, this popular element in the com- 
position of these courts was superseded. The change was 
brought about under the convenient shelter of new appella- 
tions. Courts differing little, if at all, from those of the bail- 
lis, except m name and in rank, were appointed by the king 
with the title of sieges presidentiaux, or presidencies. The 
substantial difference was, that the president was aided nei- 
ther by assessors, nor peers, nor jurors, but by stipendiary and 
permanent judges. The new institution, or rather the new 
name, gradually took the place of the old. The presidencies, 
like the Parliaments, administered justice scientifically, and 
without any infusion of the public voice or sentiment. Ere 
long the mention of baillis disappears from the judicial history 
of France, although, under the name of presidencies, they 
were, in fact, perpetuated until a comparatively recent period. , 

The courts of the prevots were, in the same manner, 1 
brought into harmony with the supreme or parliamentary ju- 
dicature. They had originally been established for the trial 
of minor cases, and especially of cases affeotmg the roturiers. 
But the sphere of the prevotal courts was now enlarged. Their 
appomtment proceeded no longer from the crown, but from 
the seneschals and baillis ; and every prevot was reqiiired to 
summon as his assessors, not peers or jurors taken from the 
people at large, but persons who had graduated in the law. 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 217 

Secondly. The next consequence of the growth of the pow- 
ers and privileges of the Parliament was the depression of the 
seignorial or hereditary jurisdictions. 

Francis I. had purchased from some of the heritors of these 
rights in the city of Paris a renunciation of them for money. 
Bat the royal purse was a far less effective instrument of their 
overtlirow than the subtlety of the lawyers. They argued that 
every such jurisdiction must at first have been acquired either 
by usurpation or by a royal grant. If by usurpation, it was 
void ah origine, and no lapse of time could remedy that inhe- 
rent vice in the title. If by royal grant, then the grantee had 
been merely a royal officer, the delegate of the king's author- 
ity. But the king's delegate was bound by the feudal law to 
do homage in respect of any office holden by him under such a 
delegation. Therefore all seigneurs must do homage on ac- 
count of their patrimonial jurisdictions ; that is, they must 
acknowledge the subordination of their courts to the courts of 
their suzerain. 

The practical results of this doctrine justified the sagacity 
which had discovered and promulgated it. For, fii'st, the king 
forbade the seigneur to preside in his court in his own person. 
Secondly, he commanded him to appoint and to pay a deputy 
to be approved by the king himself. Thirdly, the seigneur was 
declared to be personally responsible for the damages which 
any one might sustain by the judicial misconduct of his dep- 
uty. Fourthly, he was also declared liable for the support of 
the prisons and court-house within his seigneurie ; and, lastly, 
it was provided that if a royal and seignorial court should both 
have their seats within the same parish, they were not to sit 
simultaneously, but by triennial alterations. All the inferior 
seigneurs were thus (so to speak) legislated out of their he- 
reditary judicatures. The right of justice was rendered not 
only a worthless, but a burdensome privilege. Still, however, 
not a few noble and princely houses yet retained, in the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries, those judicial rights which 
acquired an imaginary value by their increasing rarity, and 
which attested the patrimonial wealth and dignity of which 
those houses were the actual occupiers and the legitimate in- 
heritors. 

The third judicial revolution which I have mentioned as 



218 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

coincident with the growth of the powers of the Parliament of 
Paris, is the development of the provincial Parliaments. 

Whatever I have hitherto offered respecting the jurisdiction 
of the Parliament of Paris, must be understood as referring 
only to that part of France which was included within the 
royal domain. Though it constituted hy far the largest fief in 
the kingdom, yet many of the most important provinces of 
France lay heyond its limits, and acknowledged the great 
feudatories of the crown as their sovereign princes. But, in 
the fourteenth century, the royal domain had, by successive 
conquests, been enlarged to more than twice its original ex- 
tent. The great provinces of Normandy and Languedoc were 
at that period incorporated in it, and a new question arose, to 
be debated, indeed, by lawyers, but to be decided only by 
princes. That question was whether the supreme tribunals 
of Normandy and Languedec had not, in consequence of the 
annexation of those provinces to the crown, become royal 
courts, and whether, therefore, their judgments, in common 
with those of all other royal courts, might not be brought by 
appeal before the Parliament of Paris for revision and amend- 
ment. 

It would be beside my present object to pursue the details 
of that controversy. I will confine myself to the attempt to 
indicate, under the six following heads, what was at length 
the position taken by these, and by the other provincial Parlia- 
ments, in the judicial system of France. 

First. The most celebrated of those bodies is the Parlia- 
ment of Toulouse. It was created by Philippe le Bel, and in 
his time it embraced Gruienne, Languedoc, and the whole of 
the country to the south of the Dordogne. Charles VIII., find- 
ing that Parliament in decay, re-established it with privileges 
and immunities corresponding with those of the Parliament of 
Paris. After the lapse of eight years, the same monarch ef- 
fected a judicial union beween the two Parliaments ; that is, 
the counselors of each were declared to be counselors in both ; 
and this theoretical unity of the sovereign courts of the South 
and of the North became, in later times, the germ of the 
broader and more practical doctrine, that while each of the 
French Parliaments was sovereign and supreme within its own 
precincts, they all collectively formed one great institution, the 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 219 

dispersed members of wliicli enjoyed a perfect equality and in- 
tercommunity of rights. 

Secondly. In 1472, G-uienne and several minor districts 
adjacent to the city of Bordeaux were subjected to the juris- 
diction of a Parliament then, for the first time, created in that 
city, and were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Parlia- 
ment of Toulouse. The Parliaments of Dauphine, of Burgun- 
dy, of Normandy, of Provence, of Brittany, and of Dombes, 
were all successively established in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries by Louis XL, by Charles YIIL, by Louis XII., by 
Francis I., and by Charles IX. In the followmg century, 
Louis XIII. created Parliaments in Beam and in the Three 
Bishoprics; and Louis* XI Y. was the author of similar insti- 
tutions in French Flanders, in Franche-Comte, in Alsace, in 
Roussillon, and in Artois. But, though similar to the rest, the 
institutions of Louis XIV. did not enjoy the rank, and did not 
bear the name of Parliaments. They were called sovereign 
councils or provincial councils. There was, however, no sub- 
stantial difference between the various supreme provincial 
judicatures of France, except such as resulted from the mflex- 
ible varieties of their various local circumstances. 

Thirdly. All the Parliaments of France were sovereign; 
that is, each of them was supreme over all other royal courts 
within its appropriate precincts, and was itself exempt from 
the control of any appellate tribunal. The judgments in each 
of them were executed in every part of the kingdom proprio 
vigore ; that is, without being affirmed by the local court of 
any other province. Eventually it was decided by practice, 
if not m theory, that no appeal would lie, even to the Parlia- 
ment in Paris, from any judgment of any provincial Parlia- 
ment. 

Fourthly. The institution of a sovereign court in any part 
of France came to be considered as the proper and indispensa- 
ble recognition of the fact that the territories over which it 
administered justice had been finally annexed to the French 
crown, in derogation of any other sovereignty, whether feudal 
or foreign. 

Fifthly. All these Parliaments, though instituted by the 
king, were considered as the official protectors of the rights 
and independence of their respective provinces. 



220 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

Sixthly, and finally. The system of admmistering justice 
in the Parliament of Paris, and all the judicial rights, powers, 
and privileges of that hody, belonged, in all their force and in- 
tegrity, to all the other sovereign Parliaments of the realm, 
though subject to variations originating in local and peculiar 
causes. 

In the age of Louis XIV., therefore, France possessed a ju- 
dicial system characterized by a remarkable uniformity in all 
the provinces of the kingdom, and by a no less remarkable sub- 
ordination within each province of the several ranks of the ju- 
dicial hierarchy to each other. Every reader of French his- 
tory is, however, aware of the very prominent place which it 
assigns to the Parliaments, and especially to the Parliament 
of Paris, in the political events, and especially in the political 
controversies, of the reigns of the family of the house of Bour- 
bon. It remains for us, therefore, to inquire. What were the 
motives, and what the effects, of these habitual departures of 
the magistracy from what we in England should consider as 
their only appropriate duties ? 

Before I attempt a more direct answer to that question, I 
would direct your notice to a peculiarity in the French juris- 
prudence for which our own habits of thought and action do 
not prepare us. I refer to the Ministere Publique. No one 
can rightly appreciate the conduct of the French Parliaments 
who is not in some degree conversant with the nature of that 
institution. 

Originally, the enforcement of the penal law, and the pro- 
tection of the rights of the crown or of society at large, be- 
longed to the seigneur and his vassals in the fiefs, and to the 
seneschal and the king's vassals in the royal domain. The 
judges of those feudal courts were also the conservators of the 
public peace, of the revenue, and of all the other public rights 
within their respective precincts. But when those tribunals 
were superseded by the royal courts, all such functions were 
transferred to the advocates of the king, and, in subordination 
to them, to the royal procureurs or solicitors. As early as the 
year 1354, the principal of these advocates appears to have 
borne the title of Procureur G-eneral. He was the chief of 
what was called the Parquet ; that is, of a body of advocates 
and procureurs specially engaged to represent his person, and 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 221 

to execute his orders in any tribunals in whicli he could not 
himself he principally present. The Procureur G-eneral and 
his substitutes were collectively called the Ministere Pub- 
lique. 

The functions of this great officer were alike high and ardu- 
ous. He was the universal public prosecutor. Before any 
adjudication of the court to which he was attached, he deliv- 
ered his conclusions ; that is, he demanded a judgment in such 
terms as, in his opinion, the law sanctioned and the public in- 
terest required. Therefore, if, in any private suit, the htigants 
concurred either in asking a sentence which the law forbade, 
or in deprecating a sentence which the law enjoined, the pro- 
cureur general, by his conclusions, resisted them both, in the 
interest, as it was expressed, of the law itself. To the min- 
istere publique also belonged many extra-judicial functions. 
They were examiners of weights and measures. They had a 
surveillance over certain parts of the police. They occasion- 
ally ratified the by-laws of incorporated guilds. They were 
protectors of the royal revenue, and consequently exercised 
some degree of influence in every branch of the administration 
of public affairs. The procureur general, as the head of this 
great ministry, was considered not only as a member of the 
Parliament of Paris, but as its most powerful member ; and, 
under the shelter of his great, though indefinite authority, the 
Parliament were continually enabled to prefer, and were some- 
times successful in establishing, their own political pretensions. 

Those pretensions were not destitute of some plausible basis, 
as, indeed, in the modern European world. Might has always 
rendered to Right the homage of abstaining from a naked and 
avowed usurpation. 

When the kings of France originally made laws for the gov- 
ernment of the royal domain, it was, as I have already ob- 
served, in an assembly of the great vassals of the crown, and 
with their concurrence. If the king proposed to the assembly 
a law which the vassals disapproved, the language in which 
they expressed their dissent would, in the phraseology of those 
days, have been called a remonstrance. But in the Middle 
Ages the word remontrer did not mean to complain of an in- 
jury, but rather to represent, or bring under consideration, 
suggestions on any proposal. 



222 THE INFLUENCE OP THE JUDICIAL ON 

But at the period when the Parliament of Paris was acquir- 
ing its peculiar character as a court of justice, the meetings 
of the great vassals of the crown, to od-operate with the king 
in legislation, were falling into disuse. The king, as I have 
already explained, had begun to originate laws without their 
sanction ; and the Parliament, not without some show of rea- 
son, assumed that the right of remonstrance, formerly enjoyed 
by the great vassals, had now passed to themselves. 

For it was a principle admitted, I think, without exception, 
by every French king and minister in his turn, that the Par- 
liament were neither bound nor at liberty to execute any roy- 
al ordinance unless it had first been communicated to them 
and registered among their records. Before the art of print- 
ing was in use, it was scarcely a fiction to say that a court of 
justice was and must be ignorant of any ordinance which had 
not been first read over to them, and then deposited in their 
archives for facility of reference. 

When any such ordinance was thus communicated to the 
Parliament, they, if dissatisfied with it, answered the commu- 
nication by a "remonstrance," in the sense which I have al- 
ready given to that word. If their remonstrance was disre- 
garded, their next step was to request that the projected law 
might be withdrawn. If that request was unheeded, they at 
length formally declined to register it among their records. 

Such refusals were sometimes, but were not usually suc- 
cessful. In most instances they provoked from the king a per- 
emptory order for the immediate registration of his ordinance. 
To such orders the Parliament generally submitted ; but, even 
in that case, the arret for registering the law was usually pre- 
faced by a preamble, explaining that it had been pronounced 
in submission to the king's express commandment. The act 
of obedience was thus accompanied by a protest against the 
compulsion by which it had been enforced ; and thus, even 
when the right of resistance did not actually prevail, it was 
at least asserted ; and, by every new assertion of it, that right 
(as it was supposed) acquired additional strength. 

To fortify themselves in this contest, and to enlist public 
opinion on their side, the Parliament maintained the doctrine 
that, among the laws of the realm, some might be distin- 
guished from the rest as being elementary and fundamental ; 



THE MONARCI-nCAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 223 

and tliey ascribed to themselves the character of guardians of 
those fundamental rights during the long intervals which sep- 
arated from each other the sessions of the States- G-eneral. 

But an effective veto on all royal ordinances, though the 
chief, was not the only political power with which law or cus- 
tom had invested them. 

For, first, they were, to a certain extent, legislators in their 
own persons. The royal laws which they were hound to exe- 
cute were often defective, and it became an established maxim, 
that, in order to give efficiency to any such law, the Parlia- 
ment might promulgate arrets for supplying such omissions. 
Those supplementary arrets were, indeed, provisional only, un- 
til the defect of the existing law should be supplied by the 
king himself; and it was always in the power of the king to 
abrogate or disallow them. But, notwithstanding these re- 
strictions, the right of making such arrets was a political priv- 
ilege of no light significance. 

Secondly. As often as any Papal Bull was sanctioned by 
the king, it became a part of the law of France to be enforced 
by the ordinary tribunals. Every such bull was therefore sent 
to the Parliament for registration ; and by resisting or remon- 
strating against the registration of it, the Parliament not only 
established the right of intervening in all ecclesiastical affairs, 
but succeeded in investing themselves, in popular esteem, with 
the high office of protectors of the liberties of the G-allican 
Church. 

Thirdly. They also established a right to interpose in dip- 
lomatic questions ; for treaties with foreign powers, being in- 
corporated into that part of the Jus G-entium to which the Par- 
liaments were bound to give effect, were also supposed to re- 
quire a parliamentary registration. They therefore not sel- 
dom provoked remonstrances and refusals from that high tri- 
bunal. It must, however, be added, that, in the exercise of 
this power, the conflict between the Parliament and the crown 
was sometimes nothing better than a comedy. For example, 
when Francis I. had signed the humiliating treaty of Madrid, 
he laid it before all the Parliaments of France, who all refused 
to register it or to acknowledge its validity, because, as they 
alleged, no king of France had a right to bind himself and his 
people to such a dismemberment of the realm. Nothing could 



224 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 

exceed the meekness with which the haughty monarch for 
once bowed to a rebuke which narrowed his own prerogative. 
To be absolved from an unwelcome engagement to which his 
Christian faith and royal honor had been pledged, even the ac- 
knowledgment of the controlling authority of a company of 
long-robed lawyers did not seem an excessive price. He was 
not always thus docile ; for, 

Fourthly. The Parliament assumed the right to adjudicate 
as mediators between all the other powers of the state, and 
that mediation was usually accepted except when the king 
himself was engaged in any such controversy. When, how- 
ever, the Parliament attempted thus to define the limits of the 
prerogatives of Francis I., he indignantly told them that they 
were attempting to debase him to the condition of a Doge of 
Venice, and to raise themselves to the rank of Venetian sen- 
ators. 

P'rom that age till the subversion of the monarchy there was 
a constant succession of conflicts between the king and the 
Parliament, with an invariable sameness in the result. Thus 
Henry II. assailed them by dividing the grand chamber into 
two bodies, which held alternate sessions of six months each. 
Charles IX. had recourse to the practice of holding Lits de jus- 
tice, where, by appearing in person in the Parliament, he si- 
lenced all remonstrances to the registration of his edicts. 
Richelieu dismissed some refractory members and imprisoned 
others, and compelled the whole company, with bare heads and 
on their bended knees, to supplicate the king's forgiveness. 
The court, the princes, the populace, and the armies of Conde 
and Turenne dissolved that union of all the Parliaments and 
sovereign courts of France, which, during the troubles of the 
Fronde, had menaced the kingdom with a new and strange 
revolution — a revolution by which the absolute dominion of 
the house of Bourbon would have been transferred to a com- 
pany of hereditary magistrates. Louis XIV. never forgot or 
forgave the attempt. Clothed in his hunting dress, and (as it 
is usually added) with his whip in his hand, he presented him- 
self to the Parliament of Paris, who, even more astonished by 
his costume than by his imperious tone, listened submissively 
to his commands to address to him no more remonstrances, but 
to confine themselves exclusively to the discharge of their ju- 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 225 

dicial office. By letters patent of the year 1673, lie directed 
that all the roval edicts and declarations should be rea-istered 
at Paris in eight days, and at the seats of the other Parlia- 
ments in six weeks from their date ; and, until they had been 
so registered, all remonstrances against them were strictly pro- 
liibited. During all the remaining part of his long reign, the 
French Parliaments became simply courts of justice and noth- 
ing more. 

The secret of their ill success in the attempt to elevate them- 
selves to the highest rank among the members of ths political 
commonwealth is immediately detected. They were an aris- 
tocracy elevated by learning, talents, and station above the 
mass of the people, but an aristocracy which was at once ob- 
noxious to the plebeian malignity of the many, and to the pa- 
trician haughtiness of the few. In the eyes of the nation at 
large, the parliamentary counselors were but a privileged caste, 
and their contests with the crown were but so many selfish 
struggles for their own personal aggrandizement ; a?id even 
in the judgment of many of the illustrious magistrates of 
whom France is so justly proud, of L'Hopital, of Mole, of Har- 
lay, and of D'Aguesseau, the attempt of their colleagues to at- 
tract to the Parliament of Paris a large participation in the 
powers of the crown, appeared at once hopeless of success, and 
most disastrous if successful. To those great men it V7as evi- 
dent that the inevitable effect of the accomplishment of such 
a design must have been, not to rescue the nation from des- 
potism, but to subject it to the most galling of all tyrannies, 
by uniting the legislative, administrative, and judicial powers 
m the hands of the same men, and of men totally disnualified, 
by their education and their habits, either to legislate with 
wisdom, or to reign with magnanimity. 

The preceding statements will, I trust, enable me to render 
intelligible in a few words the more precise answer which it 
remains for me to return to the question with a viv^w to which 
they have been chiefly made — the question, namely, Vf hy did 
not the administration of justice contribute in France, as it 
contributed in England, to create and to maintain tha national 
liberties ? 

First, Our land has ever lived under the dominion of law. 
By that power the physical force of the many, the formidable 

P 



226 the'' influence of the judicial on 

influence of tlie few, and the arbitrary will of tlie monarcli, 
have ever teen controlled with more or less of energy and suc- 
cess. This dominion of the law was exercised, in the time of 
our Saxon progenitors, in the Folk-motos, the Shire-motes, and 
the "Wittenage-motes. In our own times it is exercised in 
our courts of justice and in our high court of Parliament. 
During more than a thousand years, our legal tribunals have 
been interposed between the various organs of the state, to vin- 
dicate the rights, and to arrest the encroachments of them all. 
Throughout that long course of ages, those legal sanctuaries 
have been at once the bulwarks of order and the strongholds 
of hberty in England ; and to them it is to be ascribed that 
the English Parliaments have never fallen as the Cortes of 
Spain fell, and as the States- Greneral of France silently disap- 
peared. 

If, as I believe, this is a correct summary of the judicial 
history of England, it reverses with no less correctness the ju- 
dicial history of France. For, first, the French judicatures 
were all erected on a feudal substratum. The king's senes- 
chal and vassals in the royal domain — ^the seigneurs and their 
vassals in their respective fiefs — constituted the original tri- 
bunals of the whole kingdom. But they constituted, also, the 
deliberative and executive government, and the military staff 
of each fief, royal or seignorial. They were bodies in which 
the people had no share, over which public opinion exercised 
no control, and the members of which were too numerous to 
feel any lively sense of individual responsibility. The baron 
who, at the head of his armed followers, was the terror of the 
vicinage, was not less formidable to his neighbor when he sat 
in his castle-hall to administer justice. The code of his tri- 
bunal might be reduced to the old pithy compendium, " Si 
veut le Roi, si veut la Loi." 

Seco]idiy. As if to multiply securities for wrong, and to 
give full scope to prejudice, justice was regarded in those 
times, not as a sacred duty, but as a patrimonial iiilioritance. 
Like property of every other kind, it was considered by the 
owner as a legitimate means of personal gratificatioxi. No 
two ideas were ever more absurdly or more perniciously as- 
sociated. 

Thkdly. When the legistes employed their subtlety to 



THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 227 

usurp the functions and to improve the system of the feudal 
judges, they introduced into their courts all the arbitrary max- 
ims which they had learned from the irnperial and canonical 
codes. They rendered the administration of the law more 
scientific indeed, but they also rendered the law itself more 
subservient to the absolute powers of the crown. 

Fourthly. When the king at length interposed to supply 
the defects of the feudal judicatures, by the appointment of 
prevots and baillis, he still united, in the persons of the higher 
of those officers — the baillis — the judicial, military, and polit- 
ical functions. In proportion as they were effective lieuten- 
ants of their sovereign, they were partial and inefficient dis- 
pensers of justice to the people. But, 

Fifthly. The substitution of stipendiary and permanent as- 
sessors for the ancient peers or jurors, in the tribunals of the 
prevots and baillis, still more effectually deprived those tri- 
bunals of all sympathy with the people at large, and of every 
tendency to nourish or vindicate popular or constitutional priv- 
ileges. 

Sixthly. The Parliament of Paris had, from its birth, an 
indestructible bias toward arbitrary power, because, as I have 
shown, it was originally identical with the council, which it- 
self was the passive and helpless instrument of that power. 

Seventhly. When the judicial authority of the Parliament 
had passed from the grandees to the legistes, the legistes held 
it, not in vii-tue of any unequivocal right, which was openly 
acknowledged, but in virtue of a silent usurpation, which was 
studiously concealed. Like all other usurpers, the legal coun- 
selors of the Parliament were timid innovators. They imi- 
tated the spirit and habits of their predecessors, because they 
desired to be confounded with them. They countenanced the 
assumption of legislative pov/er by St. Louis and his success- 
ors, gladly rendering their aid to the monarchical authority, 
on which the maintenance of their own was entirely depend- 
ent. There was, at all times, this kind of tacit compact be- 
tween the kings and the Parliaments of France, at the expense 
of the rights and franchises of the French people. 

Eighthly. The multiplication and dispersion of the Parlia- 
ments enfeebled the magistracy by dividing it. They never 
formed a single body, compact, unanimous, and invincible, 



THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL, ETC. 

like the twelve judges of England, when meeting on four 
terras in each year beneath the same venerable roof of the hall 
at Westminster. 

Ninthly. The judicial office became, in the persons of the 
parliamentary counselors, not only a property for life, but a 
property acquu-ed by purchase. They therefore considered 
themselves on the bench as guardians of their own personal 
rights, and not exclusively as trustees and protectors of the 
rights of society at large. 

Tenthly. The hereditary tenure of their office afterward 
converted them into a company, which stood aloof from all 
other Frenchmen. They formed, not a profession, but a caste. 
They became a distinct noblesse. They were exempted from 
all the fiscal burdens of the great body of the people. Their 
sympathies were, therefore, not with the people, but against 
them ; not in favor of constitutional privileges, but of aristo- 
cratic rights, and of the rights of the king, as the source and 
shelter of their own aristocracy. 

Eleventhly. The political character of the Parliament made 
them continually oscillate between the sycophancy of royal 
power and the flattery of plebeian turbulence. Whoever has 
read the Memoirs of De Retz is aware that, in that great cri- 
sis of their history, the Parliament were nothing better than 
the blind tools of the selfish nobles and mercenary dema- 
gogues, at whose bidding they waged war with the court and 
with Mazarin. 

Finally. Among the judges of the Parliament of Paris were, 
at all times, many of the best, the wisest, and the greatest men 
who had ever acted on the theatre of public affairs in France. 
They acted, however, on too wide a theatre. They appeared 
there in characters so numerous, incompatible, and even dis- 
cordant, that the weight of their judicial avithority was over- 
balanced by the weight of their other functions. They could 
not have fought successfully the battles of the Constitution of 
the realm and of the franchises of the people, even had such 
been their wish, because they were at every moment compel- 
led to defend their own very questionable pretensions. Nor, 
if success in such a contest had been probable, would they have 
really wished to engage in it. The aristocracy of the robe had 
no alfiance with any democracy of the jury-box, and had no 



INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS, ETC. 229 

tendency either to promote or to defend democratic claims, in 
tlie triumph of which their own overthrow was evidently and 
unavoidably involved. 



LECTURE IX. 

ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS ON THE MONARCHY OF 

FRANCE. 

That England is indebted for the growth and maintenance 
of her constitutional liberties to none of her sons so much as 
to her privileged classes, noble and sacerdotal, is an opinion 
which, for the present, I must be satisfied to announce dog- 
matically, hoping that I shall hereafter find a convenient oc- 
casion for establishing it on solid and indisputable grounds. 
In the mean time, I pass on to the inquiry which lies more 
du-ectly in my path — the inquiry, How far the influence of the 
correspondmg bodies in France contributed to subvert the 
Feudal Aristocracy, and why it was ineffectual to prevent the 
usurpation by the French Monarchs of an absolute and unlim- 
ited power ? 

As early as the Feudal Age, society in France was divided 
into the two classes of the Noblesse and the Roturiers. To 
the first of those classes belonged every tenant of a fief on 
military service. To the second of them belonged every free 
tenant of land on services exigible either in money or in kind. 

Within his fief every noble enjoyed, to a greater or a less 
extent, a sovereign authority ; that is, he could make war, 
levy troops, raise taxes, coin money, and dispense justice ; 
although, in the exercise of those powers, he was more or less 
amenable to the dominion, and subject to the control of the 
king as suzerain of the whole realm. 

This sovereign authority was, however, enjoyed in the high- 
est degree by those nobles only who bore the title of peers of 
France ; and that pre-eminent dignity, as we formerly saw, 
was first created by Louis VII. As in our days history is con- 
verted into romance, so in those days romance was converted 
into history. As the legend of Turpin (of which the arch- 
bishop of that name enjoys the unmerited credit) had sur- 



230 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

rounded the board of King Arthur with twelve knights, and 
the throne of Charlemagne with twelve paladins, so Louis VII,, 
believing, or affecting to believe those traditions, summoned 
to his Parliament twelve counselors, each of whom was an im- 
mediate vassal of the crown, and the holder of a fief lying 
beyond the precincts of the royal domain. On these counsel- 
ors he conferred the high designation of peers of France. Six 
of them were ecclesiastics, the occupants for the time being 
of the archbishoprics of Rheims and of Sens, and of the bish- 
oprics of Beauvais, of Meaux, of Noyon, and of Langres. The 
six original lay peers were the Dukes of Normandy, of Bur- 
gundy, and of G-uienne, and the Counts of Flanders, of Ver- 
mandois, and of Toulouse. These great feudatories differed 
little, if at all, from independent princes. They acknowledged 
indeed, in theory, their obligation to render services to their 
king as their liege lord. But they seldom, if ever, fulfilled it 
in fact. Especially, they were unaccustomed to perform the 
duty of attending at his feudal court or Parliament. A mem- 
orable occasion, however, arose, on which Philippe Augusts 
required, and obtained their assistance at that tribunal. It 
was on the trial of one of their own number, John, duke of 
Normandy and king of England, for the murder of his nephew 
Arthur. When that precedent had been once established, it 
was frequently followed. Sometimes the peers of France were 
convened by the king to act judicially. Sometimes they met 
at his summons, to concert with him, and with his other great 
feudatories, such legislative or administrative measures as 
were designed to take effect throughout the whole kingdom. 
The laws made, or the resolves adopted at such meetings were, 
in fact, conventions between the Peers, the Barons, and their 
Suzerain, and were executed by them in their several fiefs, 
not in obedience to the king's command, but in pursuance of 
their own compacts with him. 

There was, however, one fatal obstacle to the permanency 
of this institution. It consisted in the continually increasing 
probability of the annexation to the crown, either by conquest 
or by cession, of the lay fiefs, to which the dignity of the peer- 
age was attached. As often as such an event might happen, 
the fief would lose its separate existence, and become absorbed 
into the ever-widening limits of the royal domain ] while the 



ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 231 

peerages tliemselves would either become extinct or would re- 
vert to the sovereign as the author of them. 

In the reign of Philippe Auguste and of his successors, these 
events did actually occur. But, in their desire to perpetuate 
the peerage of France, those kings, as often as any such 
princely fief was added to their domain, annexed that dignity 
to the possession of other fiefs. Thus, for example, the duch- 
ies of Anjou and Bretagne and the county of Artois were ele- 
vated to tJiis rank by Philippe le Bel. But the substitution 
was a nominal, not a real equivalent ; for, in the days of Phil- 
ippe le Bel, Anjou, Bretagne, and Artois were no longer inde- 
pendent feudal principalities. Each of them was, at that time, 
holden as an apanage by a near relative of the reigning mon- 
arch. The three new peers, therefore, owed to the king, as the 
head of their family, a subjection which the Dukes of Nor- 
mandy, of Burgundy, and of G-uienne would never have avowed, 
and an obedience which they would never have rendered. 
This first encroachment on the real powers of the peerage was 
quickly followed by others. Thus the number of the ]ay peers 
was first augmented from six to seven. Then it became cus- 
tomary to attach this honor to every new apanage which was 
created in favor of any other prince of the blood royal. At a 
later time it was bestowed, like an order of chivalry, on for- 
eign sovereigns ; as, for example, on the King of Scotland and 
the Duke of Cleves. Afterward, nobles of comparatively low 
degree, holding fiefs ivithin the royal domain, were admitted 
to this high titular rank. At last it degenerated into a species 
of honorary distinction, which the crown conferred sometimes 
as appurtenant to certain lands, and sometimes as attaching 
merely to the person of the grantee during his life. 

By these methods the peerage of France descended from the 
rank of a power in the state balancing the power of the crown, 
until it had become little or nothing more than an embellish- 
ment of some illustrious families, or a mere badge of royal fa- 
vor and of courtly etiquette. 

Next in the aristocratic hierarchy to the peers of France, 
but next with a long interval, were the peers of the royal 
domain. They also were the immediate vassals of the king 
on military tenures, but they were his vassals, not as king of 
the realm, but as duke of the duchy of France. Subordinate 



232 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

to these, and of much lower degree, were the throng of seign- 
eurs, distinguished from each other by countless gradations of 
rank and inequalities of power, the result either of the com- 
parative importance of their fiefs, or of the different conditions 
on which those fiefs had originally been gTanted. As early as 
the thirteenth century, the policy of assailing and crushing 
this seignorial phalanx had passed into a traditional maxim 
of the Capetian monarchs. How, under the guidance of that 
maxim, those monarchs prohibited private wars and trial by 
battle, and established communes or bourgeoisies, I attempted 
to explain in two former lectures. Philippe Auguste pursued 
the same design by abolishing the Droit de Parage ; that is, 
by acknowledging none but the eldest of the sons of a deceased 
seigneur as an immediate vassal of the ' crown, in respect of 
any part of the paternal seigneurie. Philippe le Bel aimed a 
still deadlier blow at their power, by depriving all future 
grantees of heritable lands of the three chief feudal rights ; 
that is, of the haute justice, of the power of sub-infeudation, 
and of the right of ecclesiastical patronage. But the fatal 
wound was inflicted by Louis XL To him is chiefly due the 
praise, or the reproach, of having made the noble separable 
from the seignorial rank. Precedents were not, indeed, alto- 
gether wanting to justify that innovation. But he first grant- 
ed patents of nobility, not only to roturiers of low degree and 
of base callings, but even to whole classes of men. Charles 
IX. improved on this example. He sold such patents by the 
score. Henry IH. advanced farther still. He brought to 
market not less than 1000 of them in the single year 1576. 
In a nobler spirit, as became him, but with results not dis- 
similar, Richelieu offered nobility as an inducement to men of 
wealth to establish commercial companies, and to embark in 
other expensive and hazardous public undertakings. 

Thus the same fate befell both the peers of France and the 
seigneurs of France. The honors of each of those bodies first 
became the subject of royal patronage, and then were multi- 
plied so profusely as to lose all their essential value. The 
greater and the smaller feudatories had alike, in earlier times, 
been the possessors of well-ascertained rights, and the deposit- 
ories of formidable powers. From age to age they had ineffect- 
ually resisted and deplored the decline and fall of those ancient 



ON THE MOJ\A*R.CHY OF FRANCE. 233 

prerogatives, until at length the time arrived when the order 
of nobility itself was debased into a subject of court favor 
and of mercenary patronage. 

Yet, even in the midst of that debasement, nobility was 
something more than a mere titular distinction. Some sub- 
stantial, or, at least, some highly- valued privileges, adliered to 
it. Thus every noble was exempt from all ordinary taxes. 
He had the rights of the chase, from which all ignoble persons 
were excluded. Special laws were occasionally made to ena- 
ble the nobles to redeem tlieh forfeited mortgages, or to repur- 
chase lands which had been sold for the payment of theh debts. 
The law of succession to the estate of a deceased ancestor was 
more indulgent to the claims of a noble than of an ignoble heir. 
In favor of the noblesse, many ecclesiastical benefices, many 
military commissions, and some public offices, were closed 
against all other candidates. And, finally, a certain part of 
the royal revenue was appropriated to the payment of pensions, 
in which the nobles alone participated. 

It is, however, almost superfluous to say that such advan- 
tages as these were the source, not of strength, but of weak- 
ness. The possessors of them occupied the invidious position 
of burdens to the rest of society ; nor did they relieve that 
odium by any important contributions to the public service. 
Under Richelieu, Mazarin, and the personal administration of 
Louis XI Y., the nobles were, indeed, almost entirely excluded 
from any share m the conduct of public affairs ; and though 
lavish of their blood m the field, they seldom won, even there, 
any other praise than that of heroic gallantry. Neither had 
they the power which every great body in the commonwealth 
derives from the unity and consolidation of its various mem- 
bers. The Noblesse, in the seventeenth century, was com- \ 
posed of many different and discordant elements — of nobles by 
birth — of nobles by patent — of nobles by office — and of nobles 
by franc-fief, that is, by the possession of certain lands to 
which that rank was inseparably annexed. These various 
sections of the patrician order, though possessing the same 
dignity and the same privileges, had nothing else in common, 
but regarded each other with a jealousy as acrimonious as 
that with which they were all regarded by the plebeian classes 
of society. I know not that a more curious and impressive 



234 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

proof could be given of the diminished importance of the most 
ancient hereditary seignem-s in the reign of Louis XIV., than 
has been recently drawn by M. Dareste de la Chavanne from 
the arguments by which, at that time, they vindicated their 
ancestral claim.s to privilege and to honors. As that learned 
author has pointed out, De la Roque, their historian and apol- 
osfist, resorted to various authorities to show that Adam was 
the tenant of the world itself, as a fief holden by him as the 
immediate vassal of the Creator ; and that the later feudatories 
were but so many holders of arriere fiefs, derived by sub-in- 
feudation from that primaeval title. St. Simon, and even Bos- 
suet, appear to have lent their countenance to the kindred 
opinion that the feudal rights were not a human, but a divine 
institution. When, relying no longer on their swords and their 
military retainers, the seigneurs rested their claims on such 
doctrines as these, it was evident that their strength had de- 
parted. "When, virtually acknowledging themselves to owe to 
the nation at large a defense of their privileges, they could 
acquit themselves of that obligation by no better arguments 
than were thus supplied by these zealous advocates, it was 
clear that their days were numbered. 

I have purposely compressed into the narrowest possible 
compass the statements I have to make in explanation of the 
impotence of the French Noblesse to prevent the usurpation by 
the house of Bourbon of an absolute and unlimited power, 
that I might leave myself the more space for explaining why 
the sacerdotal order was equally powerless. 

The G-allican Church, in the earlier feudal times, enjoyed a 
large measure of independence, which may be considered, fii'st, 
as internal ; secondly, as judicial ; and, thirdly, as financial. 

Her internal independence, or self-government, consisted, 
first, in the free capitular elections of her bishops and other 
great dignitaries ; secondly, in her national synods, which met, 
deliberated, resolved, and promulgated their resolutions, with- 
out receiving or soliciting any royal or papal sanction ; and, 
thirdly, in the control which she more or less directly exer- 
cised over all the secular powers of the kingdom. "While every 
other influence was tending to resolve France into an incohe- 
rent assemblage of hostile states, the Church was the centre 
and the cementing principle of the national unity "While 



ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 235 

violence, oppression, and wrong held an otherwise undisputed 
dominion over the land, it was from that sacred shrine that 
order and justice proceeded on their mission of mercy to man- 
kind. 

Secondly. The judicial independence of the ancient G-al- 
lican Church was attested by the nature and the extent of 
her jurisdiction. No clerk in holy orders was amenable to any 
courts hut hers, except when charged with capital offenses. 
Those courts had also an extensive cognizance of all oases of 
heresy and usury, and of all matrimonial and testamentary 
suits. To give effect to their sentences, the secular arm was 
always at their bidding. 

Thirdly. The financial independence of the Church of 
France in the Feudal Age rested on the ancient and then well- 
established doctrine that spiritual persons were not liable to 
pay tribute for the support of any of the civil governments or 
potentates of the world. Whatever they gave tovrard the ex- 
igencies of the king, was in form at all times, and in reality 
at that time, a free and voluntary donation. 

But, notwithstanding this internal, judicial, and financial 
independence, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy were in many re- 
spects dependent on the Feudal Hierarchy. Six of the French 
prelates were (as we have already seen) peers of France, en- 
joying within their respective fiefs the same powers as the lay 
peers, and the same secular titles of dukes or counts. The 
temporalities of fourteen other sees were also holden of the 
crown, either as immediate or as arriere fiefs. Many bishops, 
abbots, and other dignitaries held their endowments as vassals 
of feudal lords, and most of them bore the relation of lords to 
vassals of their own. 

From this intimate connection of the churchmen with the 
feudal tenures of that age, resulted many restraints upon her 
freedom of action. Fkst, as a relief was due to the seigneur 
on the accession of a new tenant to every lay fief, so, on the 
election of every bishop or other ecclesiastical feudatory, the 
seigneur was entitled to a corresponding payment, which was 
called a regale. Secondly, as often as an ecclesiastical corpo- 
ration, sole or aggregate, acquired any lands in perpetuity, the 
lord was prejudiced by the loss of those payments, which, if 
the land had remained in the possession of lay men, would 



236 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

have accrued to him on the deaths or alienations of the ten- 
ants. For this loss he was entitled to a compensation, which 
was called the Droit d'Amortissement. Thirdly, the freedom 
of canonical elections was not a little restrained by what were 
called " recommendations ;" that is, suggestions addressed by 
the seigneur suzerain to his ecclesiastical vassals, of the names 
of persons whom he wished to have preferred to vacant bene- 
fices. Fourthly, in some cases this seignorial patronage was 
openly asserted by the lord, and admitted by his clerical vas- 
sals, as an absolute right ; as when an abbey, or prebend, or 
chapelry had been founded, and endowed by the lord or by his 
ancestor. But, fifthly, it was chiefly in their character of pro- 
tectors of the Church that the feudal seigneurs subjected it 
to a vexatious and oppressive control ; for, as no churchman 
might either make war, or administer justice in capital cases 
in his own person, these indispensable offices were performed 
on his behalf, either by the suzerain of his fief, who was then 
called his Avoue, or by some powerful chief in the neighbor- 
hood of his church or abbey, who was then called its Vidame. 
For this service the Avoue or Yidame sometimes extorted a 
recompense in the form of a territorial cession, and sometimes 
he inflicted on his clients wrongs as grievous as those which 
he had undertaken to avert. 

But from these burdens the Church was at length emanci- 
pated, if indeed that term can with any propriety be applied 
to the forcible substitution of the royal for the feudal tyranny. 
It was a gradual and a tardy change, of which the foundations 
were first laid by Philippe Auguste. From all churchmen 
holding fiefs, or (as I understand the case) arriere fiefs, on 
military tenures, he exacted a pecuniary composition for those 
services in the field which they were unable to render in per- 
son. His successors gradually substituted the crown as the 
universal protector of churches and monasteries, in lieu of the 
avoues and vidames who had formerly sustained that oflioe. 
From that usurpation the elastic logic of arbitrary power drew 
many momentous inferences. First, it was held that the price 
of the protection received by these ecclesiastical bodies was 
due to him who actually rendered it, and to him alone. Con- 
sequently, the tribute which, under the name of mundium, had 
been formerly paid to the seignorial avoues and vidames, was 



ON THE MONARCHY OP FRANCE. 237 

lost to the seigneurs and acquired "by the king. Next, it was 
inferred that the regale, or rehef exigible on the election of 
every bishop or abbot, was payable, not to the immediate lord, 
but to the royal protector of the episcopal or abbatial fief. 
Then the droit d' amortissement followed the new destination 
of the mxundum and the regale. And, finally, this series of 
encroachments was completed by Louis XL, who transferred 
from the courts of his feudatories to his own royal courts the 
-cognizance of all questions relating to the patronage of eccle- 
siastical benefices. Thus, step by step, the G-allican Church 
had, at the end of the fifteenth century, been extricated from 
her former dependence on the Feudal Hierarchy. 

But the Popes had not been indifferent or inactive witnesses 
of these innovations. The genius of Hildebrand, the persever- 
ance of his early successors, and the energy of Innocent III., 
were unintermittingly exerted to render Rome the seat and 
centre of a dominion more extensive and formidable than the 
empire which Julius had established, or than that which Tra- 
jan had administered. It was the object of their meditations 
by day, and of their visions by night, to destroy the freedom 
of canonical elections, to transfer to the Holy See the patron- 
age of all the benefices of Christendom, and to centralize at 
the Vatican the judicial and financial adnnnistration of the 
whole ecclesiastical commonwealth. In this great enterprise, 
the Papal monarchy triumphed for a while over the French 
monarchy, as the French monarchs had before triumphed over 
the Feudal oligarchy. The G-allican Church became, though 
for a short season, subject to the almost absolute sway of the 
Church of Rome. And yet the fruits of the conquest were 
not eventually to be gathered in by the conquerors. The 
freedom (internal, judicial, and financial) of the Church of 
France was the prey of the Popes and of the French kings in 
turn ; but the spoil remained at last in the grasp, not of the 
pontifical, but of the royal invader. The history of those rev- 
olutions may be traced in the collection of the ordinances 
promulgated under the Capetian dynasty. The time at my 
disposal will, not allow me to advert to them, except so far as 
may be necessary to show how the kings of France encroached, 
first, on the internal indepen'Jence ; secondly, on the juJicial 
franchises ; and thirdly, on the financial liberties of the Gal- 
ilean Church. 



238 THE n>fFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

First, tliarefore, I will attempt (however briefly) to indicate 
what were the encroachments of the French kings on the in- 
ternal independence of the Church of France. 

"When Bossuet proposed, and the French clergy adopted the 
declaration that the Pope had no authority, direct or indirect, 
in temporal matters, they seemed to he laying down a rule ; 
but they were, in fact, only raising the question, which is sug- 
gested by every enactment of those ordinances on ecclesiastical 
subjects, What is the distinction between things temporal and 
things spiritual ? It is a distinction which can never be ac- 
curately drawn in words, for the simple reason that it has no 
such accurate existence in fact. No human interest is exclu- 
sively temporal, and none is exclusively spiritual. The holy 
and the profane states have many provinces in common, and 
have no provinces which are not intermixed or conterminous. 
What the Author of our existence has thus joined together, 
man can not put asunder. In simple times and remote ages, 
he did not even make the attempt. The priestly and the king- 
ly office were then the same. The Imperator was also the 
Pontifex Maximus. In teaching that the Church and the 
State are properly convertible terms, Mr. Coleridge and Dr. 
Arnold announced no new discovery, but merely recorded or 
revived an ancient tradition. 

In the Christian world, however, the administration of the 
Ecclesiastical and the Civil governments ever has been, and 
must ever remain, in diflferent hands ; and each of those two 
powers has ever exhibited, and will, perhaps, never cease to 
exhibit, the propensity to enlarge, at the expen.se of the other, 
the indeiiuite limits of its own appropriate dominion. And thus 
the history of France is a record of the efforts made, not less 
by the worthiest than by the least worthy of her kings, to sub- 
stitute the royal will for the internal freedom v>^hioh belonged 
to the Church of their realms, as a part of her ancient and sa- 
cred inheritance. 

Of all those princes, St. Louis was the most upright and sin- 
cere. But if he had been the most crafty, he would scarcely 
have expunged a word from his Pragmatic Sanction. It de- 
clared the right of every chapter, cathedral or abbatial, freely 
to elect its own head and dignitaries, and the right of each 
patron freely to collate to his own benefices. Nothing could 



ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE, 239 

be more just and liberal ; nothing could more directly oppose 
the pretensions of the court of Rome ; but nothing, it must 
be added, could more effectually countenance the royal claims 
of the pious legislator himself. Thenceforward, mdeed, no 
papal missives could direct how a vacant see or abbey should 
be filled. But the seigneur's right or habit of addressing to a 
chapter recommendations of some favored candidate survived 
the Pragmatic Sanction of St. Louis. Now such was, at that 
time, the number of the seigneuries absorbed in the royal do- 
main, and such was the increase of the royal authority over 
the seigneurs whose fiefs lay beyond it, that the edict wliich, 
in appearance, restored the seignorial influence in elections and 
collations, did in reality but enlarge the influence over them 
of the royal legislator himself. 

After the death of St. Louis arrived those periods in which 
the judicial blindness of the successors of St. Peter prepared 
the way for the great Reformation. That worldly wisdom, of 
which they so justly boast, never failed them more than when 
they transferred the apostolic chair from Rome to Avignon. 
During their long exile from the banks of the Tiber to those 
of the Rhone, the Popes yielded to the French kings a submis- 
sion almost as absolute as that which is rendered to the Turk- 
ish emperor by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Li that pe- 
riod the captive pontiffs were sometimes overawed and some- 
times seduced into recognizing the royal right of presentation 
to almost all the benefices of France not belonging to private 
patrons. 

The same papal infatuation next exhibited itself in the great 
Schism. At that time, and by a skillful use of the authority 
wliich that schism qonferred on them, the French monarchs 
made other conquests over the enfeebled Papacy. Then it was 
that the Popes admitted the right of the secular courts to ad- 
judicate on questions relating to benefices and capitular elec- 
tions ; and then, also, was obtained by the kings of France 
the yet more important advantage of being left in the exclu- 
sive poisession of the right, or, at least, of the power to convoke 
synods of the national clergy. It is difficult or impossible to 
say when that right was first asserted by them, but it is well 
ascertained that, from the time of the great Schism, they in- 
variably and successfully maintamed it. 



240 THE INFLUENCE OP THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

The next great occurrences in the history of the Church of 
Rome are the Councils of Constance and of Ba^de. Under the 
shelter of their Cis- Alpine decrees, and under the guidance of 
John G-erson, whom most of the fathers at Constance had re- 
vered as their leader, Charles YII. prornulgated the Pragmatic 
Sanction of Bourges. It provided for the freedom of canonical 
elections ; that is, for their freedom, not from royal, hut from 
papal interference. It forbade the acceptance of any bulls on 
that subject, or on the subject of the collation to benefices. 
It excluded all aliens from ecclesiastical preferments in France ; 
and it authorized an appeal from any future decisions of the 
court of Rome to the next oecumenical council. 

To these provisions of the edict of Charles VII. v^as given 
the much boasted, though very equivocal title of the liberties 
of the Galilean Church. But to the son and successor of 
Charles no liberties were welcome, nor any advantages of much 
account, unless they were acquired by guile, and supported by 
the mysterious policy in which he delighted and excelled. 

Louis XI., therefore, revoked the Pragmatic Sanction of 
Bourges, and seemed, at least, to abandon every position which 
had been taken by his father against the encroachments of the 
Roman pontiffs. And yet, in reality, he stipulated for, and 
obtained the enjoyment of powers hardty less extensive than 
those which he so renounced. No ingenuity will now, per- 
haps, be sufficient to unravel the intricate web of his nego- 
tiations on this subject. The most probable explanation of 
them is, that Louis acted in this, as on most other affairs, un- 
der the guidance of his two master passions — his superstitious 
dread of the powers of the world to come, and his insatiable 
thirst for aggrandizement in this world of shadows. At once 
to propitiate and to outwit the bearer of the keys of Paradise 
was precisely the kind of success which would have been most 
grateful to that astute and cu'cuitous understanding. 

Be this as it may, his two immediate successors seem to 
have labored, long and fruitlessly, to discover what were the 
rights and what were the powers which he had transmitted 
to them for the internal government of the Church of France. 
In the reign of Francis I., however, every such doubt was 
effectually di:ipelled. His concordat with Leo X. was nothing 
less than the immolation of the liberties of the Gallican 



ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 241 

Church to the interests of her temporal and spiritual sover- 
eigns. On the one hand, the kings of France, since the coun- 
cils of Constance and of Basle, had mamtained the superiority 
of such councils to the Pope, and had asserted their own right 
to demand periodical convocations of them. These claims 
Francis abandoned to Leo. On the other hand, the Popes had 
perseveringly asserted, at least in words, an indefeasible right 
to nominate bishops to every vacant see, and to appoint to ev- 
ery other ecclesiastical dignity. This right Leo abandoned to 
Francis, reserving to the court of Rome nothing more than a 
formal and ineffectual veto on the royal nominations. From 
that time forward the superior clergy of France, ceasing to be 
either elective, or feudal, or pontifical, became exclusively 
monarchical. To the present hour the concordat of Francis I. 
continues to form the basis of the relations between the Pa- 
pacy and the French government. The heads of that govern- 
ment, whether royal, imperial, or republican, have ever since 
bestowed on their friends those sacred offices which, under the 
two first dynasties, and under the early Capetian princes, 
were the rewards of a real or a supposed pre-eminence in piety 
and learning. 

We may, I think, condemn without reserve the selfish poli- 
cy which thus despoiled the Gallican Church of her freedom 
of holding national synods, of electing ecclesiastical dignita- 
ries, and of collating to vacant benefices. But the farther 
encroachments on her liberties admit of much more apology, 
if not, indeed, of a conclusive defense. The most considerable 
of them is that great innovation which interposed the crown 
as the necessary channel of intercourse between the Pope and 
the whole ecclesiastical body of France. When Boniface VIII. 
promulgated a bull requiring the attendance of the French 
prelates at Rome, Philippe le Bel answered by an edict for- 
bidding them to go beyond the limits of his own dominions. 
From that time it became, first, a favorite opinion, and after- 
ward an absolute and fundamental maxim of the French ju- 
rists, that no pontifical bull or brief, or other mandate, was 
binding on any Frenchman unless it had been, nor until it had 
been, expressly ratified by the King of France. Among the 
many proofs which the collection of royal edicts might supply 
of the general acceptance of this doctrine, I confine myself to 



242 THE INFLUENCE OP THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

those whicli were enacted by tlie evasive and superstitious 
Louis XL Subservient as he was to the Papal court, he yet 
appointed a commissioner to ascertain, by the inspection of all 
documents which might be received from Rome in the diocese 
of Amiens, whether they were, in any respect, repugnant to 
the laws of the realm. He forbade any papal legate to exer- 
cise within the kingdom any powers to which his own sanc- 
• tion had not been first given. And he proclaimed the actual 
nullity within France of every adjudication of the court of 
Rome, even on subjects within their admitted competency, 
unless such judgments had been inspected by himself, and con- 
firmed by his own authority. At a later period, when Julius 
II. made his extravagant declaration of war against Louis XII., 
. and enlisted the whole (51ergy of France in the cause and quar- 
rel of their temporal sovereign, this principle of law grew into 
a popular passion. Such, indeed, was the strength of that 
passion, that Francis I., heedless as he was of the ecclesiastical 
rights of his people, found it necessary to stipulate, in his con- 
cordat with Leo, for the continuance of this royal veto on the 
enforcement of any papal bull or brief within his dominions. 

Most Protestants will applaud, and but few Roman Catho- 
lics will strongly condemn, this interposition of the crown be- 
tween the Papacy and the National Church of France. Yet it 
•was an infringement of her internal liberties which could be 
justified only by the preceding unjustifiable invasions of them. 
Had she been permitted to retain her ancient rights of episco- 
pal elections, and of convoking independent synods, she would 
have had the means, and would scarcely have wanted the will, 
to oppose to every usurping rescript from Rome a resistance 
quite as effectual as that of the royal veto, and far more con- 
stitutional. The kings of France, having despoiled the Gral- 
lican Church of her powers of self-defense, found in her de- 
fenseless state the apology for intercepting her intercourse with 
the pontiff whom they, as well as she, acknowledged to be her 
spiritual head on earth. The one anomaly begat the other ; 
but injustice does not cease to be injustice because a preceding 
wrong has rendered it convenient or inevitable. When reduced 
to the dilemma of an absolute servitude to her ecclesiastical 
monarch, or of an increased servitude to her temporal monarch, 
fthe G-allican Church wisely preferred or acquiesced in the lat- 



ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 243 

ter as the lighter evil of the two. But to have reduced her to 
that dilemma, or to have retained her in it, was not, on that 
account, the less an unrighteous usurpation. 

Such having been the encroachments made by the kings of 
France on the internal independence of the Grallican Church, 
I pass, secondly, to the consideration of the encroachments 
which they made on her judicial franchises. 

The jurisdiction of the French ecclesiastical courts was 
originally of great extent. In addition to the powers which I 
have already mentioned, they had cognizance of almost all 
cases under the plea of what was called connexite ; that is, if 
a suitor complained, not only that his rights were infringed, 
but that, in the infringement of them, his adversary had been 
guilty of sin, the spiritual tribunal became entitled, by reason 
of that alleged connection of the violation of the divine and of 
the human law, to entertain the suit ; for Innocent III. had 
taught that, as the guardian of the law of G-od, the Church 
might require every one who had offended against it to answer 
at her bar for his transgression. 

This subtlety would probably have availed little, or not at 
all, if the ecclesiastical tribunals had not, in those times, ex- 
celled all others in the simplicity of their procedure, in the 
equity of their laws, and in the wisdom and impartiality of 
theu' judges. In the twelfth century, and at the commence- 
ment of the thirteenth, they therefore enjoyed the utmost pop- 
ular favor, and continually enlarged the sphere of their juris- 
diction. 

But (as I have already observed) the judgments of the ec- 
clesiastical courts, when affecting the persons or property of 
the suitors, were referred to the secular arm for execution. 
The Church had none but spiritual weapons in her own arse- 
nal. She could excommunicate, or withhold the sacraments, 
or refuse absolution, but she could neither fine, imprison, tor- 
ture, or kill, ijroprio vigore. When she denounced such pen- 
alties, she was dependent on the temporal power for the en- 
forcement of them. 

But, in denouncing such penalties, the Church transgressed 
the limits of her own high and holy office, and of that trans- 
gression she received the appropriate recompense. When some 
of the bishops of St. Louis applied to him to carry into effect 



244 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

punishments which they had denounced against certain wrong- 
doers, his wise and equitable answer was, that he could not 
confirm any sentence, and so make himself responsible for it, 
until he had first satisfied, himself of its justice. Thus, by in- 
voking the aid of the arm of flesh, the spiritual courts afford- 
ed, to the royal judges not merely a pretext, but a justifica- 
tion, for reviewing their decisions in spiritual matters. By 
encroaching on the province of the secular tribunals, they en- 
abled those tribunals to make an irresistible encroachment 
upon their own appropriate sphere of action. 

In the following century, the right of the prevots and baillis 
of France to correct or reverse the sentences of the bishops or 
their vicars was much agitated ; and, to resolve it, Philippe 
de Valois convened a mixed assembly of municipal lawyers 
and of canonists. They decided that the king's judges had no 
right to entertain an appeal from any sentence of an ecclesi- 
astical court, but that, if any such court should abuse the 
powers with which it was invested, or usurp powers not prop- 
erly belonging to it, those judges might prevent or correct any 
such abuse. In technical language, they declared that the 
prevots and baillis were competent to receive les appels comme 
dfabus. In fact, they laid down a rule exactly corresponding 
with that which is at this day observed in "Westminster Hall. 

Thus the episcopal courts ceased to be sovereign, that is, to 
be exempt from the supervision or control of any other tribu- 
nal. But a more serious loss of power awaited them. When 
the royal judges introduced into their courts the reforms to 
which I adverted in a former lecture, the ecclesiastical courts 
fell into comparative disesteem. In France, as in England, 
the conflict of jurisdictions between the two was active, and 
even violent ; but there, as here, popularity and success at- 
tended on the secular judges. In the fourteenth century, the 
sages of the French law exhausted much of their time and 
learning in the attempt to define the limits between the re- 
spective provinces of the royal and episcopal tribunals. There 
is said to be a book, called Le Songe du Verger, held in high 
esteem by the curious in bibliography, in which a clergyman 
and a knight are made to debate that arduous problem in the 
presence of Charles V. But the debate must have been either 
imaginary or ineffectual, for it was not until the year 1539 



ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 245 

that any positive law was made for the determination of it. 
An ordinance of that year confined the competence of the spir- 
itual judges to questions exclusively spiritual, and to cases in 
which personal actions might he hrought against clerks in 
holy orders. 

The result of a comparison of the judicial liherties of the 
Church of France as they existed in the twelfth and in the 
sixteenth centuries will, therefore, he to show that, during that 
interval, they had declined to such an extent as very greatly 
to impair the ancient influence and authority of the Church 
in temporal matters. Even admitting the consequence to have 
been unfortunate, the means hy which it was accomplished 
were, I think, evidently wise and justifiable. 

It remains, thirdly, to inquire, in what manner the finan- 
cial liberties of the Grallican Church were, during the same 
period, invaded by the royal power ; and the result of that in- 
quiry will be to show that, in this respect also, her losses, 
though veiled under certain decorous forms and apologies, 
were very considerahle in suhstance. 

Ecclesiastical persons and property in France were original- 
ly exempt from all imposts, and therefore they promised to the 
Popes, in the commencement of the thirteenth century, a rich 
pecuniary harvest. For that purpose, the fiscal sickle was em- 
ployed by the court of Rome with the most assiduous dili- 
gence. Alarmed by the demands of their spuitual sovereign, 
the French clergy invoked the protection of their temporal 
mionarch, Louis IX. ; and, in compliance with their entreaties, 
he forbade, by his Pragmatic Sanction of 1268, the transmis- 
sion of any money to Rome without his own express authority. 
The papal extortions were for the moment repelled, but the 
Church was then summoned to the more arduous task of pro- 
teoting herself against her royal protectors. Though she had 
no longer to pay Peter's pence to the pontifical treasury, she 
was required to furnish subsidies to the Capetian exchequer. 

The Pope now, in his turn, assumed the office of guard- 
ian of the ecclesiastical possessions, but with comparative ill 
success. When, for example, Philippe le Bel called on the 
clergy for money, Boniface VIII. forbade their compliance. 
But Boniface was not a Hildebrand. Philippe compelled him 
to retract his prohibition, or, rather; to disavow the plain 



246 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

and unequivocal meaning of the words in which he had an- 
nounced it. 

Thus the temporalities, of which the clergy were the indis- 
putable proprietors, became the prize for which their spiritual 
and their secular monarchs contended with each other. But 
in that contest the Church found her best security. So long 
as the two potentates continued to regard each other as hostile 
competitors for her wealth, the one or the other of them was 
always on her side. Her real and most urgent danger was in 
their reconcilement. She had nothing so much to dread as 
their friendly compromise, at her expense, of their rival pre- 
tensions. 

Such a compromise was, in fact, accomplished when the 
apostolic chair was transferred to Avignon. Then the de- 
pendent Popes acquiesced in the usurpation by the crown of 
the patronage of all the sees and sacerdotal dignities of France ; 
and then the complaisant kings consented that the Pope should 
raise what money he needed from the inferior clergy, and es- 
pecially that he should receive the annates, or revenues of all 
benefices during the first year after each vacancy of any of 
them. 

These mutual concessions, prompted as they were by tran- 
sient motives, were themselves of short and uncertain contin- 
uance. They formed the subject of ardent controversy during 
many generations, until they were at length, in substance, rat- 
ified and rendered permanent by the concordat between Fran- 
cis and Leo. 

But, during that controversy, the royal demands on the rev- 
enues of the Church were never intermitted. Emboldened 
by the feebleness of the papacy during the great Schism, the 
French kings endeavored to bring the clerical order under the 
same laws of taxation as at that time applied exclusively to 
the Tiers Etat, or Roturiers. The resistance of the clergy 
was resolute and effectual, for they were zealously supported 
in it by the Parliament of Paris. Charles VIII. withdrew 
from the struggle with so formidable an alliance ; and from 
his reign may be dated the final recognition, as a fundamental 
law of the realm, of the doctrine that no imposts could be lev- 
ied upon the Church without the free consent of the ecclesi- 
astical order, lawfully given in a free assembly. 



ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 247 

That consent was, however, but seldom refused ; nor, m- 
deed, would such a refusal have been either just or prudent, 
for the wealth of the clergy was enormous. Such estimates 
of it as were commonly made and accepted before the acces- 
sion of the house of Bourbon, were too vague, and too obvi- 
ously partial, to merit any serious notice. But in the year 
1639, an ecclesiastical synod adopted and sanctioned a report 
on the subject, called "L'Etat abrege de I'Eglise de France," 
which represented the g-ross annual revenue of all the sees, 
parish churches, abbeys, convents, monasteries, commanderies, 
and chapels in France as amounting to 103,500,000 crowns, 
and the net annual revenue as amounting to 92,000,000. 
Grreat as is the authority for these figures, I confess that it is 
not without some incredulity that I have transcribed them ; 
for, after making a fair allowance for the different effective 
power of money now and then, it is as if the Church of France 
in our own days possessed an independent annual income of 
between ten and twelve millions of pounds sterling. 

Doubtless, however, her endowments in the age of Louis 
XIV. were exceedingly great, and would have been fatal to her 
but for three principal reasons. First, though not an enlight- 
ened, Louis was a very zealous son of the Church, and abhor- 
red any sacrilegious confiscation of her property. Secondly, 
against any such confiscations she was then defended by her 
diocesan, provincial, and national synods. In each diocese the 
clergy elected deputies, who met at the metropolis of each prov- 
ince, and then nominated members of a general assembly. 
These convocations, it is true, were all convened by the king, 
and royal commissioners represented him at the national synod. 
But it was a free and full representation of the sacerdotal or- 
der, and enjoyed authority and influence enough to insure the 
respect of the other orders in the state. And, thirdly, the dan- 
gers of plethoric wealth were averted from the Church of 
France by the wise liberality Math which she was accustomed 
to contribute to the exigencies of the commonwealth. The 
crown had long attempted to participate in the ecclesiastical 
treasure by the coarse and ready methods to which arbitrary 
power in distress so habitually resorts. . At one time the re- 
gale had been extorted from all the churches of France indis- 
criminately. At another, royal officers had been employed to 



248 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

administer the revenues of vacant benefices. Then the paro- 
chial vestries were required to submit their accounts to audit- 
ors appointed by the king. And when such means of exaction 
proved ineffectual, recourse was had to the terror of those doc- 
trines on the subject of church property which the Reformers 
had so often advocated ; so that even L'Hopital himself lent 
the sanction of his name to the opinion that the clergy were 
the mere trustees, and the state itself the true proprietor of 
such endowments. But to such demands and such menaces 
the sacerdotal order opposed sometimes well-timed remonstran- 
ces, and sometimes judicious concessions. They controlled the 
despotic genius of Richelieu, and overawed the rapacity of 
Fouquet, when each of these financiers, in his turn, meditated 
a tax which would have deprived them of the whole of their 
emoluments during one of every four successive years. But, 
on the other hand, they repeatedly advanced large sums, either 
on the security of the royal revenue, or for the exoneration of 
particular branches of it from debt to other creditors. In the 
reign of Louis XIV. they consented to pay, for the support of 
his government, the ordinary decimes, that is, a tenth of the 
annual income of each benefice ; and, in great public exigen- 
cies, they added to that heavy income tax what were called 
the extraordinary decimes, that is, an occasional increase of 
the rate of it. 

The Church of France has seldom, if ever, received a due 
acknowledgment of the wisdom and patriotism which thus dis- 
tinguished her financial relations to the crown. In the midst 
of the pecuniary distresses of Louis XIY., she had the sagacity 
to teach, as he had the prudence to learn, that in her loyal at- 
tachment he had a resource more abundant, as well as more 
secure, than he could have found in the lawless spoliation of 
her wealth. Between her and him there therefore grew up 
a tacit compact, that, on the one hand, she should be free to 
retain and manage her possessions, but that, on the other hand, 
she should relieve, with no niggard hand, the ever-recurring 
wants of his treasury. It was a compact indefinite, indeed, 
and much liable on his side to abuse ; but it was not, in fact, 
very grossly abused. The G-allican Church in his age was (it 
is true) compelled to contribute to the support of many costly 
wars, of much improvidence, and of not a little profligacy and 



ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 249 

corruption, but, by wise firmness and wise forbearance, slie 
still found herself in possession of a financial freedom unknown 
to any other body in the state, until the bursting of that great 
tempest which, on the close of the eighteenth century, pros- 
trated all the powers and all the institutions of France. 

The preceding details, wearisome as they may have appeared, 
have seemed to me essential to the intelligible statement of the 
answer which it remains for me to return to the question with 
which I commenced the present lecture — ^the question, namely, 
Why the influence of the Privileged Orders of France, Noble 
and Sacerdotal, was ineffectual to prevent the usurpation by 
the monarchs of that kingdom of an absolute and unlimited 
power ? My answer to that question, then, is. 

First. That the original peers of France were inadequate 
to that great constitutional office, because they were not the 
aristocratic subjects of the king, so much as independent and 
rival princes. Their power excited his fears, and their domin- 
ions excited his cupidity. They were successively his allies, 
his enemies, and his victims. But they were too great to act 
either as the subordinate partners and props of his lawful au- 
thority, or as the legitimate checks on the unlawful abuse 
of it. 

Secondly. Neither the peers of France (after the conquests 
of Philippe Auguste), nor the other seigneurs, ever enjoyed, in 
the kingdom at large, an authority, legislative, executive, or ju- 
dicial, co-ordinate with that of the king. As I had occasion to 
show in a former lecture, the royal judges and the Parliament 
of Paris assumed the whole judicial power which, before the 
accession of St. Louis, had belonged to the noblesse. The king 
became sole legislator, subject to an imperfect veto by the 
Parliament ; and the administration of the executive govern- 
ment was conducted by the crown through the agency of its 
subordinate officers. Therefore the nobles had never in their 
hands, at any later period, any one of those three weapons by 
which alone the royal prerogatives can be peacefully and ef- 
fectually controlled. 

Thirdly. In the States-Greneral, the seigneurs appeared 
only as the elected deputies of their order. They did not sit 
there proprio jure ; and I shall hereafter have occasion to ex- 
plain why the deputies, who from time to time were convened 



250 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 

to the states, failed to acquire tlie power wliicli properly belongs 
in all free governments to the national representatives. 

Fourthly. The peerage and the nobility of France were 
rendered impotent to all purposes of constitutional government, 
by the mercenary and extravagant multiplication of their num- 
ber, by the descent of the privileges of every noble to all his 
sons and more remote male descendants, and by the conse- 
quent poverty and dependence of the great majority of their 
order. Their force was thus diluted until it had almost ceased 
to be felt at all. 

Fifthly. The exclusive and most invidious privileges of the 
nobles greatly impaired their political influence. They were 
elevated too far above the level of the people at large to admit 
of any fellowship or reciprocal attachment between them. The 
aristocratic order never enjoyed the weight which results from 
its intimate union with the plebeian. 

Sixthly. There was a similar want of union between the 
noble and the sacerdotal orders. They were not separate mem- 
bers of the same body, but separate and often antagonistic 
bodies. Though not infrequently combining their forces in 
the States-Greneral, it was a combination which usually had in 
view rather a triumph over the Tiers Btat than the accom- 
plishment of any objects in which the Three Estates had a 
common interest against the crown. 

Seventhly. The transfer to the crown of the patronage of 
all sees and other ecclesiastical dignities had a fatal tendency 
to impair the independence of the clergy. It filled their ranks 
with mercenary candidates and necessitous suitors for the 
royal favor. 

Eighthly. The use which the kings of France made of that 
patronage might seem to have been dictated by the desire to 
emancipate themselves from the salutary control under which 
they would have been holden by a more independent clergy. 
The bishoprics became little better than endowments for the 
younger branches of noble families. The abbeys were made 
so many apanages for lords and ladies of broken fortunes. The 
great abbey of Fontevrauld, for example, was governed during 
several centuries by an almost unbroken succession of abbesses 
of the blood royal. 

Ninthly. The enormous inequality of rank and wealth be- 



THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 251 

tween the superior and inferior clergy of France, was another 
enervating effect of the possession and abuse by the crown of 
the patronage of the higher dignities of the Church. It in- 
duced a real, though unavowed, separation of the clerical or- 
der into two sections ; the first partaking in all the interests 
and prejudices of the Noblesse, the second attaching itself to 
all the schemes and passions of the Roturiers, but each inca- 
pable of a hearty co-operation with the other against monarch- 
ical encroachments. 

Tenthly. The so-called liberties of the Grallican Church 
reduced her from the rank of a constitutional guardian of the 
rights of the people to the rank of a submissive dependent 
upon the pleasure of the crown ; for the real effect of those 
boasted liberties was merely to interpose a secular power be- 
tween the Church of France and her spiritual sovereign. La- 
mentable as may have been, in other times and countries, the 
abuse of the Papal supremacy, yet the Pope's free exercise of 
that supremacy is essential to the political authority and to 
the political influence of any Church in communion with 
Rome, unless, indeed, she possesses and exercises aa inde- 
pendent right of self-government. 

Eleventhly. "When the Galilean Church lost that self-gov- 
ernment — that is, her right of freely convoking national syn- 
ods, and of freely deliberating and voting in them — she had no 
longer the means of exerting the legitimate influence of the 
ecclesiastical upon the political government. Her diocesan, 
provincial, and general convocations, though a pretended, were 
not an effectual substitution for the loss. If in those assem- 
blies any voices had been raised in opposition to the royal 
will, they would immediately have been silenced by the royal 
commissioners. 

Twelfthly. The loss of the invidious liberties, judicial and 
financial, of the Grallican Church, might, perhaps, have been 
a source, not of weakness, but of strength, if she had been per- 
mitted to retain her internal liberties, that is, her right of self- 
government in what related to synods, canonical elections, and 
free intercourse with the papal court. But as the loss of those 
liberties brought her in bondage to the king, so the simulta- 
neous loss of her financial and judicial franchises, by bringing 
her into subjection to the Parliament, eventually rendered 



252 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 



more effective and irresistiLle lier bondage to the arLitrary 
powers of the sovereign. 

Other explanations might be given of the incompetency of 
the privileged orders of France to arrest the growth of the royal 
despotism. What I have already oifered may be sufficient, if 
not fully to explain, at least to suggest the explanation of the 
causes why they were so long the passive spectators or the 
active promoters of a usurpation of which they were destined 
at length to be themselves the victims. 



ry 1 



LECTURE X. 

ON THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

In my last two lectures I endeavored to explain, first, how 
the Judicial institutions of France contributed at once to sub- 
vert the Feudal Confederation, and to promote the growth of 
the absolute Monarchy in that country ; and, secondly, why 
the Privileged Orders, Noble and Sacerdotal, failed to arrest 
the advance of that Monarchy toward despotic power. I now 
proceed (as far as the time at my disposal may admit) to re- 
solve the corresponding questions with reference to the States- 
General. 

In entering upon that inquiry, it is necessary that I should 
begin by stating (though the statement must be far more brief 
and imperfect than the importance of the subject may seem to 
demand) what was the legitimate composition of those bodies, 
what their methods of procedure, and what the constitutional 
limits of their authority. 

It is an obscure and an intricate inquiry. When it was 
proposed by Louis XYI. to the Notables of 1787, they were 
able to answer him only by a long antiquarian controversy ; 
and such was the prevailing ignorance on the subject, that (as 
we learn from Dumont) an English lawyer (the late Sir Sam- 
uel Romilly) was detained on his journey through one of the 
cities of France to extemporize for the perplexed citizens a 
mode of procedure for conducting the election of their deputies 
to the States-Greneral of Versailles. Yet, in the midst of this 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 253 

darkness, we may distinguisli some few salient points on 
which history has cast a clear and a steady light. 

First, then, it is evident that the States- Greneral could not 
lawfully meet except in pursuance of citations issued by the 
sovereign himself. Next, it is well established that each of 
the three estates (the Clergy, the Nobles, and the Commons) 
were to be so cited. In the feudal age (as we formerly saw) 
the king had been accustomed to summon to his Parliament 
all his tenants in capite, lay and ecclesiastical, holding seign- 
euries within the limits of the royal domain. He had also 
occasionally added to them all the greater feudatories of the 
crown, holding fiefs beyond those limits. Now, when the feu- 
dal Parliaments gave place to the States- G-eneral, the same 
practice was observed, but with the two following differences : 
fii-st, that the lay tenants in capite were commanded by the 
king to bring with them to the States- G-eneral such other 
seigneurs as might be chosen to represent the seignorial or 
noble tenants of their respective bailliages ; and, secondly, 
that the great episcopal or abbatial feudatories were command- 
ed by the king to bring with them to the States- General such 
other ecclesiastics as might be chosen to represent the clergy 
of the principal churches or abbeys within their several juris- 
dictions. 

But, in order to complete the assembly, the king also sum- 
moned a body of persons whose appearance is scarcely, if at 
all, to be traced in the feudal Parliaments. These were the 
representatives of the Commons. For this purpose royal writs 
were addressed to the various baillis or seneschals of France, 
commanding them to convoke the free male inhabitants of the 
villages, towns, and cities comprised in their several bailliages, 
or seneohaussees, for the election of deputies to represent them 
in the approaching States of the realm. The inhabitants of the 
rural districts, called the plat pays, were not to be so sum- 
moned, because they were supposed to be adequately repre- 
sented by their respective seigneurs. 

In obedience to these various royal mandates, the nobles 
and the clergy met at the chief city of each bailliage, and 
there elected deputies to represent their respective orders. 
There, also, they drew up, or adopted, their mandates or in- 
structions to their deputies, containing an enumeration of the 



254 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 

public grievances, of which (as members of the States-G-en- 
eral) they were to demand the redress. To such instructions 
"were given the name of Cahiers — that is, Codices. 

The election of the deputies for the Tiers Etat was a more 
complicated procedure. At each village, the electors met on 
some Sunday after mass, and chose deputies, to whom were 
intrusted the Cahiers (or list of grievances) of the villagers. 
In the towns and cities also, cahiers were prepared, and dep- 
uties chosen ; not indeed publicly, but at separate meetings 
of the incorporated trades or callings of which the commune 
or civic corporation was composed. The deputies so appointed 
in the various villages, towns, and cities then met together at 
the chief city of the bailliage, there to constitute a central as- 
sembly. The business of that assembly was, first, to elect 
deputies to represent, in the States- G-eneral, the Tiers Etat of 
the whole of that bailliage ; and, secondly, to compile from 
all the separate cahiers one general cahier, in which were meth- 
odized and recapitulated all the grievances of all the Com- 
mons living witliin its limits. 

If it be inquired who were qualified to elect, and who to 
be elected at those meetings, and by what number of deputies 
the Clergy, the Noblesse, or the Tiers Etat respectively of the 
several bailliages were to be represented, I can only answer 
that those are questions on which the Notables, in the time 
of Louis XVI., were unable to form any clear opinion, and 
which have not, I think, been satisfactorily elucidated in later 
times. 

' The States-Greneral were thus composed of the deputies of 
the three estates of the realm, but not of them exclusively. 
The princes of the blood royal, the peers of France, the cham- 
berlain, and other high feudal officers of the crown, and the 
. knights of the different orders of chivalry, also sat there. But 
they held those seats in virtue of their rank or offices, and act- 
ed rather as spectators or as ornaments in that splendid pa« 
geant than in any more important character. The chief minis- 
ters of the crown also took their places in the States-Greneral, 
where they were regarded as the legitimate channels of com- 
munication with the king, and as the advocates and interpret- 
ers of the royal proposals or demands. 

In the States-Greneral of France, as in the Parliament of 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 255 

England, the spiritual had precedence over the temporal lords ; 
but between the two first orders and the third the gulf was 
immeasurable. Of this the established ceremonial was at 
once the best proof and the clearest illustration. In their joint 
assemblies, the Clergy and Nobles sat covered ; the Commons 
bareheaded. When addressing the king, the orator of the two 
first estates stood up, but the orator of the Tiers Etat knelt 
down. The consciousness of a real, though unavowed superi- 
ority of power may perhaps, however, in France in old times, 
as in England in our own times, have given a kind of zest to 
the endurance of these innoxious indignities ; for, from age to 
age, the representation of the Commons became less and less 
in fact what it was in theory, that is, an assemblage of mere 
roturiers, possessing no definite rights or well-ascertained priv- 
ileges. Officers of state, magistrates, lawyers, merchants, and 
men of letters, eagerly sought the office of deputies in this 
great national assembly ; and the boast now so common among 
ourselves was anticipated by the Chancellor I'Hopital when he 
reminded the Tiers Etat, in the States- Greneral of Francis II., 
that none of the gates of honor was closed to then* ambition. 

The same sentiment, or rather the same fact, was an- 
nounced, at nearly the same time, by a noble French author, 
though in a very different spirit. " Gro," he exclaims, " into 
the Parliament, and you will find there scarcely any one but 
roturiers, who have purchased for themselves seats on the 
fleurs de lys. Gro into the churches, and you will behold the 
most brilliant mitres resting on heads which came into the 
world to bear the yoke of slavery. G-o into the royal palace, 
and you will see it filled by swollen pumpkins ; by men whose 
fathers were tallow-chandlers, cooks, and tailors, but whose 
audacity has raised them from the dust to the highest places, 
at the very fountain of honor. G-o into society, and you will 
mistake the gentlemen for roturiers, and the roturiers for o-en- 
tiemen ; for now, when every one is permitted to wear what- 
ever dress his purse can afford or his vanity may prefer, lace, 
silk, and scarlet have ceased to be any certain badge of noble 
birth." 

The deputies of the Tiers Etat seem to have been, not the 
wealthiest only, but the most numerous also, of the three or- 
ders in the States-Greneral, although they were usually out- 



256 THE STATES -GENERAL OF 

numbered by the two first orders united. When Louis XYI. 
authorized the Tiers Etat to send to the States-G-eneral of 
1789 twice as many deputies as the clergy and the nobility 
together, he was, therefore, the author, not only of a fatal 
measure, but of an entire innovation also. 

When the deputies of the three estates had assembled at the 
appointed place of meeting, each estate chose its own president, 
registrar, and secretaries ; and, at the conclusion of this and 
some other preliminary forms, a royal herald proclaimed the 
approach of the king. He came, surrounded by the princes 
and dignitaries of his court, himself unarmed, and unguarded 
by any armed force ; and then took his seat on his throne ; be- 
fore, but below which were drawn up, according to their rank, 
the representatives of the three orders of his people. His ad- 
dress to them was usually comprised in a few brief words of 
princely greeting ; after which the chancellor explained the 
causes of their meeting in an oration in which (after the fash- 
ion of those times) homily, eulogy, and pedantry contended 
with each other for the mastery ; though, in the midst of his 
dark speeches, the learned rhetorician never forgot to describe 
the wants of the treasury, or to invoke the aid of the represent- 
atives of France to replenish it. To this address the speaker 
of each estate made answer in his turn ; and when eloquence 
was exhausted, the chancellor directed the States to prepare, 
for the consideration of the king, a statement of all the griev- 
ances of which they sought the redress, bidding them not to 
doubt that their demands would be very graciously accepted. 

At the close of these inaugural ceremonies, the deputies of 
each estate divided themselves into twelve sections or com- 
mittees, that number corresponding with the number of the 
twelve greater governments of France. The cahiers of all the 
bailliages comprised within any one of those governments were 
then referred to one of those committees, by whom they were 
fused or digested into a single cahier for the whole of that gov- 
ernment. Each of the twelve committees then presented its 
cahier to the estate to which it belonged, and, by that estate, 
those twelve cahiers were again consolidated into one consecu- 
tive cahier. The final result of this complicated process was, 
therefore, to extract from the multitude of cahiers of the whole 
kingdom three general cahiers, each of which was to serve as 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 257 

the Bxponent of the grievances and of the demands either of 
the Clergy, or of the Nobles, or of the Tiers Etat respectively. 
On all questions which arose in the preparation of these docu- 
ments, the votes of the deputies of the States were taken both 
by the poll and by governments ; that is, in each committee 
the members gave their individual votes ; and by the majority 
of such suffrages was deteriuined the vote of the government 
for which that committee acted. 

Although, in thus representing the public grievances, each 
of the three estates often occupied much of the same ground, 
and were often substantially of the same mind, yet they did 
not usually act in concert. The cahier of each of the three 
estates was entirely distinct from those of the other two ; nor 
were the three always presented to the king simultaneously. 

When they had all been completed, and had all been deliv- 
ered to him, the States were, both of right and in fact, dis- 
solved. It was, however, usual for the king to pronounce a 
formal dissolution of them on such occasions, and they were 
then dismissed with a gracious promise from the throne that 
the sovereign would consider and give effect to then- wishes. ', 

Thus far all was preparatory. The States had projected, 
advised, and solicited reforms, but they had accomplished noth- 
ing. They retired to their homes, there to await, in impotent 
anxiety, the fulfillment or the breach of the solemn pledge of 
which alone their labors had been productive. That pledge, 
however, was seldom redeemed, either honestly or completely. 
Sometimes it was disregarded altogether ; sometimes it was 
followed by the insertion of marginal notes on the cahiers, in- 
timating, not the decisions, but the opinions or purposes of the 
king respecting the proposals contained in them ; and some- 
times he promulgated ordinances, not referring to the proceed- 
ings of the States, but as of his especial grace and mere mo- 
tion to carry their proposals, or some of them, into execution. 
Without such ordinances, the cahiers alone had no legal effi- 
cacy whatever. They were petitions, not enactments ; and 
even when they had at length ripened into positive edicts, it 
was usually found that, by the use of defective, evasive, or 
ambiguous terms, the royal legislator had defeated the very 
concessions which he affected to make. Thus "as ineffectu- 
al as a cahier" passed into a proverb : and each successive 

R 



258 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

States-Greneral placed on the front of their catalogue of com- 
plaints the royal neglect of the complaints of their immed,iate 
predecessors. 

I have sought in vain for any authentic account of the ori- 
gin and growth of the complex rules by which the election of 
the deputies and the deliberation of the States- G-eneral were 
thus regulated. But there is little risk of error in supposing 
that the forms in use in the ancient Greek and Roman cities 
of Narbonese Gaul for the election of civic officers were thence 
transferred to the French municipalities, and were borrowed 
from them by the bailliages on the election of deputies of the 
States- General ; for the love of subtle and refined schemes 
of polity, and especially of municipal polity, was one of the 
many analogies between the Greek and the French character. 
As an example of the strength of that propensity in France, 
take the scheme according to which the mayor, aldermen 
(echevins), and auditors were chosen in the city of Peronne. 
First ; each of the twelve guilds elected two delegates. Sec- 
ondly ; those twenty- four delegates nominated ten electors. 
Thirdly ; those ten electors appointed other ten. Fourthly ; 
the twenty, when so obtained, associated to themselves ten 
electors more. Fifthly ; the thirty, when thus brought to- 
gether, made choice of the mayor and aldermen. Sixthly ; 
the mayor and aldermen then named six counselors, to whom 
the masters of the guilds added six more counselors of their 
own selection. And, seventhly, those twelve counselors united 
together to form a board of audit. A people thus ingenious 
in devising political mechanism may perhaps have regarded 
as bald and uninventive the system of two degrees of election 
for the deputies in the cities, towns, villages, and bailliages, 
and may not improbably have despised, as an excess of sim- 
plicity, the contrivances for compounding a single cahier of 
grievances by the decomposition and new arrangement of all 
the separate cahiers of all the various localities of the kingdom. 

The common basis of all such refinements is suspicion. They 
all assume that, in the discharge of any office in the common- 
wealth, no man is to be trusted. They therefore mete out 
such -power in the smallest possible measures and with the 
greatest possible jealousy. Thus, as we have seen, in old 
France, the elector might not directly vote for his own repre- 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 259 

sentative, and the representative might not decide for himself 
on his own com*se of conduct. 

Such elaborate devices are, however, rather cunning than 
wise. They can not extinguish the dangers against which 
they are aimed, though they may in some degree conceal, or 
partially mitigate them ; for in every possible or conceivable 
adjustment of the political organization of a state, there will 
still lurk somewhere a despotism which, if wakened into ac- 
tivity, becomes absolute and uncontrollable, however much it 
may in ordinary times be kept out of sight, or remain habitue 
ally dormant. To treat all the depositaries of that formidable 
power as knaves or as fools is not the readiest way to avert 
such a catastrophe. 

The builder of E Utopian visions or of real Polities will of 
course, if he be wise, take securities against man's abuse of 
his authority over his fellow-men. But he will not guard 
such abuses by exactly reversing the law of charity, and by 
requiring the citizens of his visionary or of his actual republic 
to be easily provoked, to think nothing but evil, to bear noth- 
ing, to believe nothing, to hope nothing, and to endure noth- 
ing. For men usually rise or fall to the level of their reputa- 
tion ; and if soldiers are brave, judges upright, and merchants 
honest, in proportion as such is the general expectation from 
them, so, and in the same proportion, are statesmen patriotic. 
Most men reach the point of honor in their several callings, 
and a generous confidence will ever be the surest excitement 
to the public spirit of those who are called to the most con- 
spicuous public stations. 

In the case of the States-Greneral of France, suspicion fell 
into her common error of spinning her web too fine. The 
scheme combined, but could not neutralize or render inoCcu- 
ous the two opposite errors of universal suffrage and of secret 
voting : the first depriving the primary elector of the sense of 
privilege, and of most of the consequent restraints of duty ; 
the second withdrawing the ultimate elector from the keen 
but animating air and responsibilities of the Forum. 

The division of the; States-General into three different orders 
and as many chambers: was fatal to their legitimate influence. 
When we met last, I attempted to investigate those causes 
which subjugated the Noblesse to the authority of the crown, 



S60 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

and those which preserved to the clergy a comparative inde- 
pendence. The two bodies, if united together into one great 
aristocratic chamber, might perhaps have interposed an effect- 
ual barrier between the king and the people for the conserva- 
tion of the rights and the powers of both. But, in their sep- 
aration, the nobles degenerated into servile partisans of '^the 
monarch, and the clergy exhibited the characteristic and in- 
variable incapacity of men of that profession to act collect- 
ively in the affairs of nations with common temper or with 
common sense. 

Neither was it reasonable to anticipate any effective national 
progress from the deliberations of bodies chosen for the express 
purpose of methodizing, and preferring, and seeking the redress 
of long catalogues of grievances, swept together from every 
city, town, and village of the kingdom. They who delegated 
and they who accepted such a trust, must, almost of necessity, 
have misunderstood both the disease with which they had to 
do, and the means by which it might be remedied. In any 
state where well-founded complaints of misrule are thus fer- 
tile and habitual, the true disease consists in the moral and 
intellectual debasement of the sufferers, and the true remedy 
consists in whatever tends to elevate their character, and so 
to render their good government practicable. No men, and 
no society of men, ever bemoaned themselves into self-respect 
or into the sympathy of others. The flatterers of Demos will 
always encourage his complaints, and conceal from him the 
unpalatable truth that, though his loud and persevering proc- 
lamation of his wrongs may justly inculpate his rulers, it is 
also an emphatic, though an unconscious proclamation of his 
own unworthiness. 

The States-Greneral of France were also destitute of that 
important element of success which consists in a firm alliance 
between the representative and the judicial institutions. Be- 
fore the States-G-eneral were first convened under Philip le 
Bel, the courts of justice (as I showed in a former lecture) 
had become the mere creatures and ministers of the crown ; 
and before these courts had attained to the independence which 
at length rendered them formidable to the crown itself, the 
States-General had ceased to meet. During their existence 
they were never able to rely on an upright and impartial ad- 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 261 

ministration by the judges of any law whicli might be enact- 
ed at their own instance. 

In the enactment of such laws they had, moreover, no act- 
ual suffrage. I formerly attempted to show how St. Louis 
assumed to himself the legislative power, and transmitted it 
to his successors. In the interval which elapsed between his 
death and the first meeting of the States-Greneral, that en- 
croachment had ripened into an undisputed prerogative, which 
those assemblies never failed to recognize in the most express 
and formal manner. That they should have yielded, without 
controversy, to a pretension so momentous, and yet so recent 
as this, may appear to us strange, if we read the history of 
other times and countries only by the lights of our own. But 
familiar as the disjunction of the legislative from the supreme 
executive function is to our thoughts and language, the world, 
in the time of Philip le Bel, had never seen a practical exam- 
ple and illustration of such a severance. Has, indeed, such 
an example been really ever seen even now ? The Lords and 
Commons of England humbly petitioned the king (and often 
petitioned unsuccessfully) for the enactment of what they 
judged salutary laws, until at length their petitions having 
ripened into commands, they, in reality and in truth, dictated 
the administrative as well as the legislative acts of the crown, 
though always retaining the style and the posture of petition- 
ers. The States-Greneral adopted the same humble language, 
but (as we shall hereafter see) never attained the same com- 
manding position. From the ninth Louis to the sixteenth 
Louis, the king was the real as well as the nominal law-giver 
of France, 

Finally. The practice of resolving the Tiers Etat into com- 
mittees for the separate discussion of all the cahiers of each of 
the governments represented by any such committee, survives 
in France, at the present day, in the corresponding practice of 
resolving the National Assembly into bureaux, for the prelim- 
inary discussion of all important questions. It is (as we may 
daily observe there) a wise arrangement for mitigating the 
violence of a republican democracy ; but in the monarchical 
States-G-eneral, it impaired the healthful energy of the one 
democratic element of that body. The swell of popular feel- 
ing was broken alike by withdrawing the deputies, first from 



262 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 

the invigorating influence of public elections, and then from 
the sympathetic influence of public debate. 

I do not pause to qualify the preceding statements by the 
many exceptions which would be requisite to their complete 
(exactness. My time allows me only to exhibit the law, or con- 
stitutional theory, of the States-G-eneral, as it may be deduced 
from the general habits of the majority of the assemblies of 
that nature of which the records have been hitherto discovered 
and made public. I now propose to Verify and illustrate what 
I have hitherto said respecting that law or theory, by inquiring 
into the proceedings of the most memorable of those conven- 
tions which were holden in the fourteenth century. The share 
taken by the States-General in the great constitutional strug- 
gle of that age will, therefore, be the subject of our consider- 
ation during the remainder of the present lecture. 

I lately attempted to explain the manner in which the iden- 
tity or union of the Royal Council and of the Parliament of 
Paris was virtually, though not formally dissolved, so that each 
of them thenceforward existed as a substantive and distinct 
body in the state. This tacit revolution had been nearly com- 
pleted when Philip le Bel for the first time convened the States- 
Greneral of France. 

To resist the threatened invasion of the confederates of Cam- 
bray, Philip, with the consent of the Royal Council, imposed 
a tax on all his subjects, the ecclesiastics not excepted. To 
repel tliis encroachment on the temporalities of the Church, 
Boniface VIII. issued a bull forbidding the French clergy to 
pay the required contribution. Philip retaliated by an order 
forbidding them to pay the customary papal dues to Boniface 
himself. The Pope then summoned a synod, to advise him 
how he might most effectually resist this invasion of his pon- 
tifical rights ; and Philip, in his turn, summoned the barons, 
clergy, and commons of his realm to elect deputies who should 
meet him at Paris, there to deliberate on the methods to be 
pursued for the successful conduct of his controversy with 
Rome. 

To Philip himself, the importance of this great innovation 
was probably not perceptible. He, as we may well believe, 
regarded it only as a temporary device to meet a passing exi- 
gency. It was, .in fact, one of those occasiotis in which man 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 263 

gives proof rather of the sluggishness than of the promptitude 
of his insight into his own condition — of his slowness to per- 
ceive and to estimate correctly the resources within his reach, 
much more than of his sagacity in discovering and in employ- 
ing them aright. The King of France aimed at nothing more 
than to haffle an imperious antagonist. Unconsciously to him- 
self, he was laying the basis of a power destined for a while 
to balance, and at last to overthrow, the dominion of his suc- 
cessors ; but a power which, if wisely used, might have proved 
the shelter and the safeguard both of his people and of his race. 
In obedience to the citation of Philip, the States-Greneral 
met at Paris on the 10th of April, 1301. When the deputies 
presented themselves in his presence, he called upon them to 
state of whom they held their seignorial fiefs and their eccle- 
siastical benefices. Their answer was returned by a loud and 
unanimous acclamation, the three orders with one voice de- 
claring that they held them all of Philip himself and of his 
predecessors. To his inference that they were, therefore, all 
bound to support him against the pretensions of Boniface, they 
listened with diminished enthusiasm, and retired to prepare a 
more deliberate reply. It was at last returned by each of the 
three estates apart from the rest. The nobles pledged them- 
selves to support the king in his quarrel with their persons 
and their property, and demanded that he should resist the in- 
justice and the usurpations of Rome. The Commons implored 
him to maintain inviolate his sovereign rights, and to announce 
to the whole world that, in claiming a superiority over him in 
spiritual matters, Pope Boniface had fallen into manifest error, 
and had contractexl the guilt of mortal sin. "With ill-disguised 
reluctance, and not till after long delay, the clergy at length 
assented to the conclusion of the nobles. The session was then 
closed ; when, strong in the suffrages of the representatives of 
his people, Philip promulgated a royal ordinance, forbidding 
the exportation of any money or merchandise from France to 
Rome. 

In reliance on such of the modern French historians as have 
studied with the greatest diligence the ancient monuments of 
their native land, I hazard the statement that there is not to 
be found, in any writer of the age of Philip, any remark on the 
great constitutional innovation which had thus distinguished 



264 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

tlie times in wliioh. tliey lived. If tlie fact be really so, this 
is but an example the more of the familiar truth, that politi- 
cal changes are seldom the result of any profound policy, but 
generally spring from impulses unheeded and misunderstood 
by those who act in obedience to them. If a Machiavelli or 
a Montesquieu had been living in France in those days, a sol- 
itary student of the shifting scene, with what inquisitive in- 
terest would he not have observed papal ambition contributing 
to plant in that country the most promising shoot of national 
liberty that had ever taken root there, and the people rising 
into importance from the struggle between their sphitual and 
temporal monarch as to the limits of their respective jurisdic- 
tions. It would have been a craven philosophy which, from 
such events, would not have exultingly inferred the progress- 
ive and the secure development of the democratic in union 
with the other elements of power in the commonwealth. We 
know, indeed, such hopes, if indulged, would have proved fal- 
lacious ; but from such a fallacy the most profound think- 
ers of that period could hardly have been exempt. The next 
meeting of the States-Greneral would probably have confirmed 
their error. 

The gallant resistance of the Flemings to the treacheries 
and usurpations of Philip had enabled them, in the year 1304, 
to regain their national independence, and to effect the deliv- 
erance of the Count of Flanders and his family. Ten years 
later, the Parliament of Paris pronounced a sentence confis- 
cating the dominions of the count for the benefit of the king, 
and annexing them to his crown. To obtain the funds neces- 
sary for carrying that sentence into effect, Philip, in August, 
1314, again assembled the States-Greneral at Paris, when En- 
guerrand de Marigny, his principal minister, having repre- 
sented to them the urgent need of money for this purpose, 
Etienne Barbet, the mayor, as it would seemi, or prevot des 
marchands of Paris, pronounced a speech full of liberal prom- 
ises ; after which, says the record, the other Bourgeois, repre- 
senting the Commons, joined in a loud and tumultuous prom- 
ise of the same general nature. Regarding, or affecting to re- 
gard, these acclamations as a deliberate acquiescence in his 
demands, Philip proceeded to promulgate an ordinance impos- 
ing an ad valorem duty on the produce of the sales of all goods. 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 265 

Bald and trief as tliis account of the States-G-eneral of 1314 
may be, it is yet of great value, because it is the earliest re- 
corded instance of the acknowledgment of the right of that 
body to authorize the imposition of taxes. The informality 
with which that high function was, on that occasion, exer- 
cised, is, perhaps, rather apparent than real ; for there is great 
reason to doubt whether the States really intended to give, or 
really supposed themselves to be giving, their sanction for that 
imposition of the duties for which Philip found an apology in 
the speech of Barbet and in the shouts of his associates. It 
is at least certain that universal disquiet and insurrections, in 
almost all the provinces of France, followed immediately upon 
the promulgation of his ordinance, and that the year 1314 
was still more remarkable for the revocation than for the im- 
position of fiscal laws. Philip left to his son, Louis X., the 
inheritance of these discontents. 

The first year of the reign of Louis was signalized by the 
charters or concessions which he was compelled to make suc- 
cessively to the Normans, the Burgundians, the Picards, and 
the people of Languedoo and Champagne. Of those grants, 
the most celebrated and important is that of the 19th of May, 
1315, called the Charte aux Normands. Although they dif- 
fered materially from each other, these charters universally 
bound the king not to change the coinage, not to levy extra- 
ordinary tallies, and not to subject free men to torture, unless 
the presumption of a capital crime were of the highest nature ; 
to which the remarkable addition was made, in some provin- 
ces, of a promise to restore the trial by battle, and the right 
of private war, which had been abolished by St. Louis. 

If Boulainvilliers be accurately informed, Louis X. was the 
author of a yet more general charter, or declaration, binding 
himself and his heirs never to levy any imposts on the king- 
dom at large, except with the consent of the three estates of 
the realm. Of this important document, however, I believe 
that neither the original, nor any authentic copy has hitherto 
been discovered ; though, if any such charter or declaration 
was really issued, we may safely adopt the opinion of Bou- 
lainvilliers, that it became the basis of the authority afterward 
exercised by the States-Greneral in the imposition of general 
taxes. 



266 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 

Be this as it may, it is highly worthy of notice that the 
greater part of the provincial charters of the reign of Louis X. 
are expressly framed " sur la demande des Trois Etats" — 
words referring, I presume, not to any demand made by the 
States-G-eneral of 1314, but to demands preferred by the dif- 
ferent provincial states. Even when so understood, they suf- 
ficiently show how wide was the diffusion, and how firm the 
establishment, at that period, of the principle that the consent 
of the representatives of the people was essential to the valid- 
ity of any extraordinary impost. 

That principle seems to have been regarded as indisputable 
and fundamental when the States -Greneral met at Paris, in 
November, 1355, in obedience to the summons of King John, 
to succor him in the disastrous war in which he was then en- 
gaged with Edward III. On this occasion, the three orders, 
by the express permission of the king, deliberated, not sepa- 
rately, but together ; that request being advanced, on behalf 
of the Tiers Etat, by the celebrated Etienne Marcel, who was 
at that time the prevot des marchands at Paris. They offered 
to maintain an army of thirty thousand men during one year, 
and to impose the duties necessary for the support of such a 
force. But they stipulated that a commission of nine persons, 
of whom three were to be selected by each order from its own 
members, should have the general superintendence of the rais- 
ing of this money, and that the States should reassemble at 
Paris, in March and in November of the following year, to re- 
ceive the accounts of the receipt and expenditure of the funds 
so to be raised, and to provide, if necessary, for the augment- 
ation of them. 

A royal ordinance was made on the 28th of December, 1355, 
not only to give effect to these stipulations, but also to enlarge 
the public liberties by other provisions which the States-G-en- 
eral seem to have dictated. Thus it was declared that no reso- 
lution of the States-General should be valid unless each of the 
three orders should concur in it ; that certain extraordinary 
imposts should be payable by all persons without exception, 
the king himself and the members of his family being expressly 
declared liable to them ; that the value of the current coins 
should no longer be mutable by the royal authority ; that the 
Droit de Prise (or the right of pressing cattle, corn, and other 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 2^ 

things for the king's service) should he aholished ; and that 
the exaction of such commodities might he resisted hy force 
of arms hy the person aggrieved, with the aid of his neighhors. 

Here, then, we have, in theory at least, the unequivocal 
recognition of three great constitutional doctrines : the first, 
that the representatives of the people should meet, not merely 
when it might suit the royal convenience, hut at such periods 
as might he prescribed hy a due regard to the puhlic welfare ; 
the second, that all classes should equally contribute to the 
pecuniary exigencies of the state ; and the third, that the crown 
should be deprived of the arbitrary means of raising money by 
a depreciated coinage, or by impressments of the goods of the 
people. 

On the other hand, the States- Greneral, on this occasion, 
established two precedents, each of them productive, with but 
little delay, of unforeseen and calamitous results. By uniting 
all the three orders into a single deliberative body, they ere 
long excluded the two first orders altogether from any share in 
the national representation. By assuming the right to collect 
and audit the public revenue, they made the first step toward 
their usm-pation of the other appropriate functions of the ex- 
ecutive government. The statesmen of 1789 must have stud- 
ied to little purpose the history of 1356. 

In that year the States- Greneral met again at Paris. All 
their financial calculations had been defeated by the fatal bat- 
tle of Poictiers, and Charles (the Dauphin and Duke of Nor- 
mandy), a youth of nineteen years of age, appeared among 
them to represent the person of his captive father, and to solicit 
aid for the prosecution of the war. 

The lessons of adversity, like other unwelcome lessons, are 
learned but slowly ; and in that "stern, rugged lore," the States- 
G-eneral of 1356 proved but unapt scholars. Danger and alarm, 
as usual, elevated the most resolute and impassioned spirits 
among them to their natural pre-eminence in public assem- 
blies. Ptobert le Cocq, the bishop of Laon, and Etienne Mar- 
cel, the mayor or prevot des marchands of Paris, rose at once 
to that position. Le Cocq seems to have been the leader with- 
in the chambers, and Marcel the guide among the citizens, of 
that great party who saw with joy, even in the calamities of 
then* native land, the means of punishing their political oppo- 



268 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

nents, and of changing the :whole financial and military admin- 
istration of France. To Charles, on the other hand, these 
democratic designs were the objects of an ill-dissembled aver- 
sion, for he saw in them the impending ruin of the monarchy 
to which he was himself the heir. 

The States- G-eneral opened their session by the appointment 
of a Committee of Public Safety ; and, in deference to their 
advice, unanimously agreed to maintain, during the ensumg 
year, a standing army of 30,000 men. But severe, indeed, 
were the stipulations by which this grant was qualified. They 
demanded the immediate removal of a long list of public offi- 
cers ; the trial of them on charges to be preferred by the 
States-Greneral themselves, before commissioners of their own 
choice ; the appointment of twenty-eight new counselors, to 
be selected by each of the tliree orders from among then own 
bodies ; the release from prison of the King of Navarre, a cele- 
brated demagogue of that age ; and, lastly, the substitution, 
if possible, of Charles himself as a prisoner in England for his 
father John. 

"Who will wonder that the heir of the crown of France 
should have temporized and attempted to evade such proposals 
as these ? and who, if undisturbed by the sympathetic political 
passions of his own times, will seriously join the modern French 
democratic historians in their indignant censure of that at- 
tempt ? For the moment it was unsuccessful. Charles first 
urged that his answer cooild not reasonably be expected until 
the time appropriated by custom to such purposes ; that is, 
until the closing session of the States. "When that time ar- 
rived, he adjourned it to a later day ; and when at last it was 
necessary to make some answer, he alleged the impossibility 
of pronouncing so momentous a decision before the arrival of 
the expected orders of the absent king. 

Thus the session reached its close amid ineffectual endeav- 
ors to provide for the defense of the realm against the foreign 
enemy. But, before the deputies finally separated, they met 
together at the Convent of the Cordeliers, at the summons, as 
it would seem, and under the presidency of Le Cocq. There 
is still extant a brief notice of the discourse he delivered on 
that occasion. He claimed, or was understood to claim for 
his hearers, the right even to depose a king of France ; and 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 269 

he recited to them the protests which their twenty-eight se- 
lected members had proposed to address to Charles in person, 
if they had actually been received by him as his counselors. 

The Dauphin was now relieved from the presence of the 
States- G-eneral ; but he was unprovided with the funds neces- 
sary to encounter and repel the common danger. In his dis- 
tress he resorted to the improvident and dishonest measure of 
depreciating the currency. His new coinage was indignantly 
rejected by the Parisians. Marcel, their mayor, being sum- 
moned before the Dauphin, reiterated in peremptory terms the 
decision of his fellow-citizens, and, immediately on quitting 
the royal presence, called on them to arm in their own de- 
fense. 

The call was promptly obeyed; and to such an intimation 
of the will of the people of Paris, Charles could answer only by 
the most immediate and humble concessions. Withm twenty- 
four hours from the commencement of the insurrection. Mar- 
cel and his followers were invited to the Louvre, and were 
there assured by the lips of Charles himself of their own par- 
don ; of the immediate meeting of the States-G-eneral ; of his 
determination to displace his obnoxious counselors ; of the re- 
call of the depreciated coins ; and of his intention to remit to 
the States-G-eneral the decision of the manner in which the 
coinage might best be regulated for the advantage of the peo- 
ple at large. 

In fulfillment of these pledges, the States-G-eneral were ac- 
cordingly convened, and held their first session in the presence 
of Charles himself. There is still extant an account of the 
speech delivered by Le Cocq on this occasion. After recapit- 
ulating all the wrongs inflicted by the government on the peo- 
ple of France, and declaring their resolution to endure them 
no longer, he demanded, first, the immediate removal from the 
public service of the twenty-two obnoxious officers ; secondly, 
the reformation of all other public offices by commissioners to 
be appointed by the States-G-eneral for that purpose; and, 
thirdly, the withdrawal from circulation of all coins to which 
the States should not give their express sanction. 

Prepared as it would seem for these demands, the Dauphin 
immediately promulgated an ordinance giving effect to them 
all, and adding to those concessions other and yet greater 



270 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

augmentations of the powers of the representative "body. It 
authorized them to hold three subsequent sessions without 
awaiting any royal summons for the purpose ; to decide on the 
nature and amount of the imposts to be levied by extraordinary 
grants ; and to collect the proceeds of them by officers of their 
own appointment. To all this Charles added a pledge, that, 
without their advice, no change should be effected in the cur- 
rent coin, and no truce made with the king's enemies ; and a 
declaration that the twenty-two officers whom they had con- 
demned were unworthy of any public trust or employment. 

To complete the triumph of the States- Greneral over the royal 
authority, they were permitted to nominate a commission of 
thirty-six of their own members, charged with a general super- 
intendence of the administration of the executive government, 
and especially during the intervals between the successive ses- 
sions of the States themselves. It is not unworthy of a passing 
remark, that the Commission de Permanence, which at this 
day controls the conduct of the President of the French Re- 
public during the vacations of the National Assembly, is but 
a mere revival of the corresponding institution which kept in 
check the regent of the French kingdom four centuries ago. 

But the States-Greneral of 1357 were not satisfied even with 
this encroachment. Deputies were chosen by the three orders 
to act as commissioners in every province, and to assume the 
guidance of every department of the state. The government 
by parliamentary committees during our own civil war was 
but an imitation of the system established three hundred years 
before at Paris. And as, with us, that system was substan- 
tially, though not nominally, conducted by the House of Com- 
mons alone, so, in the fourteenth century, it was in the hands 
of the Tiers Etat only, to the virtual, though not to the nom- 
inal, exclusion of the noblesse and the clergy. 

The victory thus seemed to be complete. But with the pos- 
session of power came also its responsibilities. The States- 
(xeneral, submitting to the same hard necessity which subju- 
gates all other rulers of mankind,, were compelled to vote new 
subsidies, and to raise them by the imposition of new taxes. 
A demand so distasteful from any quarter, and so unexpected 
from an assembly of patriots and reformers, was followed by 
general disgust without doors, and by numerous secessions from 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 271 

within. The nobles and the clergy abandoned their invidious 
position, leaving to the deputies of the Bourgeois the hazards 
and the discredit of perseverance in the struggle. Even Le 
Cocq himself abandoned the popular cause, and retired to his 
diocese. 

And now the tide which had hitherto been flowing in favor 
of the States- G-eneral began, as it appeared, to ebb. Many 
cities, not excepting Paris itself, addressed the Dauphin with 
offers of pecuniary aid ; and again were to be seen at the Louvre 
the ministers whom he had so lately denounced as unworthy 
of any public trust. But a new and powerful ally appeared 
for the defense of Marcel and his adherents. Liberated from 
prison, the King of Navarre took up arms in their favor, and 
restored their self-confidence. Once more, therefore, the States- 
Greneral resumed their authority, and regulated at their discre- 
tion the financial affairs of the kingdom. Tried by that cru- 
cial test of statesmanship, they were found deplorably wanting. 
Their fiscal invention reached no farther than the renewal of 
the very measure which, but a few months before, had brought 
upon the Dauphin their own indignant and humiliating cen- 
sures. To increase the revenue, they themselves depreciated 
the currency. 

But while the States-Greneral were thus staggering beneath 
the burden which they had rashly undertaken, their partisans 
at the Hotel de Yille retained all their former audacity. The 
reappearance at the Louvre of the condemned ministers kindled 
the resentment of Marcel, who, accompanied by a body of his 
followers, presented himself before the Dauphin, and inveighed, 
with his accustomed energy, against this breach of the royal 
promise. Two of the proscribed counselors, designated as the 
Marshals of Normandy and Champagne, were at the moment 
standing on either side of Charles, and, with their concurrence, 
he answered Marcel in terms which still more excited his in- 
dignation. The two marshals instantly expiated their error. 
They fell dead at the feet of their master, of wounds inflicted 
by the order of Marcel. To rescue his own life, Charles threw 
liimself on his knees before their murderer, implored his pro- 
tection, and promised to defer in all things to his counsels. 
The terrified prince then covered his head with the red and blue 
cap, wliich the adhe-reiits of Marcel had assumed as a party 



272 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

badge, and was permitted to retain his precarious regency. 
The degradation of the Capetian race was to be signalized 
more than once, in later times, by the same humiliating adop- 
tion of the same fatal emblem. 

The regent (for, on completing his twenty-first year, Charles 
had assumed that title) was now regarded by the States- G-en- 
eral, or rather by their Commission of Superintendence, as en- 
tirely in their power ; and they permitted, or, as some main- 
tain, they advised him to meet the Provincial States of Cham- 
pagne in their assembly at Provins, If such was really the 
advice of the States- General, they must have ill understood 
their own actual position. At Provins Charles found himself 
surrounded by the nobility of that great province, and received 
their ardent assurances of their undiminished allegiance to the 
crown, and of their increased scorn and hatred of the ignoble 
Bourgeois, who had so long and so insolently usurped its he- 
reditary powers, trampled upon the delegated authority of the 
king in the person of his son, and assumed the guidance of the 
royal government. The Champenois nobles found in the re- 
gent an eager listener and a ready convert. He returned from 
Provins to command the attendance of the States-G-eneral, not 
in the disaffected capital, but at the royal residence of Com- 
piegne. 

It is maintained by some that the States of Compiegne were 
but a continuation or renewed session of the States of Paris, 
and by others that they formed a distinct and rival assembly. 
But it is admitted by all that they were the occasion and the 
scene of a decisive royalist reaction. The States of Compiegne, 
indeed, like their predecessors, reserved to themselves the col- 
lection and expenditure of the proceeds of such taxes as they 
imposed ; but they granted money freely, and brought Le Cocq 
to trial on the double charge of seditious language and of 
treasonable conduct. 

Charles made no forbearing or merciful use of his returning 
power. Clathering round him an army composed of the law- 
less adventurers by whom. France was then infested, he de- 
stroyed the crops and burned the granaries in the neighbor- 
hood of Paris, took possession of the towns and bridges on the 
Seine and the Marne, and prepared to reduce the city by fam- 
ine. On the night of the 31st July, 1358, Marcel, with a 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 273 

large body of liis adherents, had posted themselves at the Pa- 
risian gate of St. Denis, and there, with six other magistrates, 
he fell by the swords of assassins hired by Charles for the pur- 
pose. The city then received the regent in triumph, acknowl- 
edged his supreme authority, and witnessed submissively a 
large and sanguinary proscription of the citizens. 

Yet, even in the hour of his success, Charles was compelled 
to acknowledge the authority and to solicit the support of the 
representatives of the French people. His father John had 
signed, at London, a convention which ceded in full sovereignty 
to the English crown the larger and the fairer part of the 
kingdom of France. Charles, to whom it was communicated, 
regarded with just indignation so enormous a sacrifice, but 
yet was compelled to acknowledge that he had no legal au- 
thority to abrogate a treaty solemnly executed by the king 
his father. His single prospect of escape consisted in obtain- 
ing the repudiation of it from the representatives of the nation 
at large. With that view he again convened the States- Gen- 
eral. They met at Paris in May, 1359, and having declared 
the treaty of London invalid, pledged themselves to a vigorous 
prosecution of the war with England. 

Thus closes the history of the States-Greneral of France 
during the reign of John ; and thus, in the opinion of Mezerai, 
closes the history of all the States-G-eneral really worthy of 
that name. Charles, however^ came to the throne at a mo- 
ment when popular support was indispensable to the success- 
ful conduct of those deplorable wars with which the English 
monarchs were still to desolate France during eighty success- 
ive years — wars of which we have been taught from our child- 
hood to cherish an exulting remembrance, but which, as it 
seems to me, every reasonable man must regard as among the 
greatest of those calamities with which it has pleased Provi- 
dence to permit our native country and the whole of Western 
Europe to be visited. They sowed the seeds of international 
animosities, the bitter fruits of which have been gathered in 
by many past generations, and are still, too probably, to be 
gathered by generations yet unborn. 

During the frequent minorities of the kings of France, it 
happened, with a strange similarity of evil fortune, that many 
of them learned to conceive in their youth an irreconcilable 

S 



274 ' THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

prejudice against those free institutions in which, the real 
strength of their dominion consisted. It was so with Charles 
VI., with Charles YIII., with Louis XIV., with his immediate 
successor, but especially with Charles V. The inveterate re- 
sentment with which the democracy of the States- G-eneral and 
of the municipality of Paris inspired him can excite no sur- 
prise in any one, and can scarcely justify the severe censure 
which it has received from the more recent French historians. 
"Whether they justly accuse him of having mounted the throne 
with a systematic design to bring the representation of the 
French people into contempt, that so he might bring it into 
disuse, I can not now pause to inquire. But it must be con- 
fessed that the charge is not destitute of plausibility. 

For, first, Charles V., from the commencement to the close 
of his reign, appears to have studiously confounded together 
the meetings and the functions of the States- Greneral, of the 
Hoyal Council, and of the Parliament of Paris. In the three 
or four of his conventions which usually appear in the Cata- 
logue of the States-Greneral of France, the habits of preceding 
times appear to have been intentionally disregarded. Neither 
the mode of electing the deputies, nor the mode of proceeding 
in the States, nor their composition, nor even the subjects 
which engaged their attention, resembled those of the reigns 
of earlier kings. 

And, secondly, on his accession to the crown, Charles assailed 
the democratic power with a weapon the most keen which can 
ever be grasped by royal hands, but which had never been 
wielded by any of his predecessors. It was borrowed from 
the arsenal of his former antagonist. He became, in his own 
person, a financial reformer. To him is due the praise of hav- 
ing fust introduced into France, or rather into Europe, the 
practice of carefully estimating and balancing against each 
other the ways and means, and the expenditure, of each suc- 
cessive year, and of appropriating to each branch of the pub- 
lic service the funds necessary for the support of each. 

But while, by this wise economical foresight, Charles was 
acquiring the confidence of his subjects, Edward, prince of 
"Wales, as administrator of the duchy of Aquitaine, by revers- 
ing that enlightened policy, was provoking the just resentment 
of that brave and irritable people. His unmeaning warfare 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 275 

in Spain involved him in such financial difficulties as to ren- 
der unavoidable the imposition on his subjects of an enormous 
house tax, which bore the name of hearth-money. 

It was with eager delight that Charles watched the contrast 
between the conduct of his great rival and his own. Strong 
in the popularity acquired by his thrift and by his stern resist- 
ance to fiscal abuses, and stronger still in the unpopularity 
which the Black Prince had acquired by his improvident waste 
of the public money, Charles ventured to brave at once his 
two formidable enemies, the English power and the French 
democracy. The people of Aquitaine appealed to him, as their 
suzerain lord, against the misrule of the Prince of "Wales, and 
especially against his exaction of hearth-money. To enter- 
tain such an appeal would be to declare war against the En- 
glish prince, and therefore against his father. For the decis- 
ion of that critical question, Charles convened an assembly at 
Paris. 

"Whether that assembly was a convention of the States-Gen- 
eral with elected deputies representing the Tiers Etat, or 
whether it was a mere meeting of Notables nominated by 
the king himself, is disputed by the French historians. The 
words of the only original document illustrative of the subject, 
which is still extant, are hardly to be reconciled with each 
other, and afford some countenance to each of those opposite 
opinions. On the one hand, it is clear that the forms and 
semblance of the States- General were studiously maintained ; 
on the other hand, it is not less clear that, at the same time 
and in the same place, the forms and semblance of a Parlia- 
ment, or judicial tribunal, were maintained with equal solici- 
tude ; for, while the whole body was divided into three or- 
ders, as in the States-G-eneral, Charles himself appeared and 
sat among them, surrounded by his family, and by the chief 
officers of his crown, as in a Parliament. It is hardly to be 
doubted that the representative and the judicial institutions 
were thus blended and confused with each other designedly. 
It was no unmeaning ceremonial, or disregard of ceremony. 
The purpose of Charles was obviously to secure for the acts of 
the assembly both the deference with which the French peo- 
ple were accustomed to regard the resolves of the Parliament, 
and the authority which they ascribed to the decisions of 



276 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

their representatives. He designed, by combining in one body 
the attributes of both of those bodies, to bring both into sub- 
mission to his own power. He did not so much intend to im- 
part to the States-Greneral the character of a Parliament, as to 
secure for the adjudication of a Parliament the reverence so 
generally accorded to the conclusions of the States-Greneral. 

Transparent as such a device appears to us, it sufficiently 
answered the immediate object of the king. Pie could not be 
more solicitous to propagate the illusion that the assembly was 
a lawfully-constituted court of justice, than the people were 
willing to accept and to yield themselves to it. A generous 
enthusiasm in favor of a monarch who excelled in the honest 
arts of popularity ; a stern enthusiasm against the foreign 
yoke ; a hearty dislike (as the French historians assure us) 
for the cold and repulsive manners of their English conquer- 
ors ; and a no less hearty disgust for the selfishness of the 
demagogues who had governed the States- General of the reign 
of John, all concurred in impelling France to defy the En- 
glish power, and to restore to Charles the prerogatives of which 
he had so recently been deprived. The clerical order in the 
assembly assured the king that he might entertain the ap- 
peal from Aquitaine with a good conscience. The nobles of- 
fered him the support of their property and their swords. The 
Tiers Etat concurred in the propriety of the intended breach 
with Edward. And when. each of the three orders had thus 
separately spoken, the whole assembly united in the declara- 
tion that the appeal against the exactions of the Prince of 
Wales ought to be received, protesting that the King of En- 
gland would be acting unjustly if he should make that meas- 
ure the occasion of a war. 

It was in May, 1369, that this resolution was adopted. In 
the following December, Charles again convened the same as- 
sembly, to perform the less grateful office of providing the 
means of carrying on the war in which, at their instance, he 
was now involved. They accordingly agreed to maintain in 
force the tax on the sale of all goods, the salt tax, and the ad 
valorem duties on wines and liquors. To these imposts they 
added duties on the entry of wine into Paris and other great 
cities, and a hearth tax on every house not within any mu- 
nicipal limits. The almost unequaled amount and pressure 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 277 

of these imposts sufficiently attests the strength with which 
the refluent current of puhlic opinion was now running in fa- 
vor of the royal authority, and against the democratic influen- 
ces by which it had been so lately encountered and restrained. 
That such measures should have been adopted at all ; that 
they should have been adopted by a body on which the pres- 
ence of the king, his family, and his officers had impressed the 
character of a Parliament ; and that this great innovation on 
the constitutional forms of the States- General should have been 
silently tolerated by that body— all this amounted, in effect, 
to nothing less than a great counter-revolution. It was a sig- 
nal triumph of the monarchical over the popular power. It 
was the commencement of a long series of similar conflicts 
and of similar successes — conflicts and successes which term- 
inated at length in the transfer of the power of the purse from 
the representatives of the people to the ministers of the crown. 
It will be the object of my two following lectures to trace out 
(though, of course, very slightly and rapidly) the progress of 
those struggles, and to show how they at length terminated in 
a result so hostile to constitutional government in France. 

The obvious, though very imperfect analogies between the 
constitutional struggles of that kingdom in the fourteenth and 
in the eighteenth centuries, have of late given a peculiar in- 
terest and significance there to the passage of history on which 
we have been dwelling. The characters and the policy of Le 
Cocq and of Marcel, of the King of Navarre and of Charles V., 
have recently been discussed by French writers, very much in 
the same spirit, and under the influence of motives not a little 
resembling those with which we ourselves still debate the mer- 
its of Hampden and of Vane, of Cromwell and of Charles I. 
M. G-uizot has shown how far an entire exemption from our 
English prejudices may assist an author of our own times in 
pronouncing an equitable judgment on that part of our En- 
glish annals ; and if England could now boast an historical 
philosopher worthy to be brought into competition with that 
great man, his estimate of Charles Y. and his contemporaries 
might, in the same manner, supersede the advocacy or the 
censures of their French eulogists or assailants. But, une- 
qual as the most profound among us may be to emulate M. 
G-uizot's comprehensive survey of men and of their doings, it 



278 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

is within the power of the humblest to rememher and to imi- 
tate his judicial impartiality. 

I observe, then, that as neither Charles V. nor his opponents 
rose above the level of their times, so the conflict between them 
was conducted in a spiiit which, on either side, was almost 
equally narrow-minded. For, 

First ; Le Cocq and the States-Greneral, Marcel and the 
Bourgeois of Paris, seem to have acted throughout on the as- 
sumption that the democracy must always increase their own 
strength and resources exactly in proportion to their success 
in diminishing the powers of the crown. That each member 
of the commonwealth is directly interested in the support of 
the legitimate authority of the rest, was a truth as much hid- 
den from them as to ourselves it has become trite and familiar 
to satiety. 

Secondly ; the agitators of that day, as of some later days, 
contemplated the venerable edifice of society, not as a sacred 
institution, to be approached with reverence and touched with 
awe, but as a mechanism on which the rude hands of igno- 
rance or of passion might be laid without contracting guilt or 
deserving punishment. No man's conscience seems at that 
time to have been possessed with that sense of duty, or to have 
been alarmed with that dread of sm, which should either ani- 
mate or deter him who undertakes to reform the government 
of a mighty nation. 

Thirdly ; in their eagerness to subvert, the States-General 
of the reign of John forgot, or perhaps they did not know, how 
extreme is the difficulty of reconstruction. They regarded rev- 
olution as an exciting game, to be played out in the spirit of 
audacious adventure, not as the most extreme of all remedies, 
and the most arduous of all duties ; to be undertaken, indeed, 
resolutely, when the sad necessity arrives, but to be discharged 
even then with moderation and with self-control. 

Fourtlily ; the usurpers of the French government in the 
fourteenth century seem not to have remembered that, in such 
revolutions, the hour of triumph is also the hour of trial. They 
learned, when too late, that there may be, and often is, no con- 
nection at all between the vulgar talent which detects and cen- 
sures the errors of the rulers of mankind, and the nobler talent 
wliich discerns and knows how to pursue the path of safety 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 279 

and of true wisdom. The States -G-eneral were as unskillful 
financiers and as unsuccessful administrators as Charles him- 
self : and in both those functions far weaker, because far more 
unpopular, than he. In him the people at large forgave the 
excesses of youth, and pitied the misfortunes of the most ex- 
alted birth, and revered the descendant and representative 
of a long line of kings. In the blunders of the States-Gren- 
eral and their commissioners, they despised the incapacity and 
hated the insolence of a body of reckless and arrogant innova- 
tors. Reviving despotism could have desired no firmer sup- 
port in all its subsequent aggressions than the memory of such 
a revolution, conducted by such persons to such an issue. 

Fifthly ; in the excitement of that desperate game, the 
States-G-eneral were, in appearance at least, indifferent to the 
disasters of their common country, and to the high claims 
which the young heir to the crown of France had to their for- 
bearance and their zealous support. They rashly hazarded 
the independence of France rather than forego the opportunity 
of seizing upon the government. In the very dawn of his 
manhood, they studiously trained up their future king with 
such prepossessions and with such just resentments as could 
not but render him, in his more mature days, the irreconcila- 
ble enemy of the popular cause. Nor, 

Sixthly ; is it their least reproach that they squandered an 
inestimable opportunity of obtaining solid and permanent guar- 
antees for the very reforms which they most desired to accom- 
plish. The memory of the Provincial Charters of Louis X. was 
still recent and distinct. They were not ignorant of the pow- 
ers which then- Anglo-Norman enemies were deriving from the 
observance of not dissimilar charters. It was in their power 
to secure for their constituents periodical meetings of the States- 
G-eneral — ^the power of the purse — and a large share in the 
legislative power. On that basis they might have cemented a 
firm alliance of all the three orders, with a due regard to the 
powers and dignity of the crown. But all these advantages 
were, in their eyes, as nothing, if only Le Cocq might govern 
France from the tribune, and Marcel be supreme over Paris at 
the halles. 

Seventhly ; fatal also, and of ill omen, was that union of the 
representatives of the people and the demagogues. Between 



280 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

the guardians of law, of order, and of constitutional franchises 
on the one hand, and the agitators of the multitude on the 
other, there can never he any permanent reconcilement, nor 
any other than a dangerous truce. The States- G-eneral could 
not reasonahly anticipate any thing hut a ruthless and de- 
grading servitude from the elevation of him who had slaugh- 
tered the counselors of the Dauphin at their master's feet, and 
who had induced, if he did not enjoy, the personal humiliation 
of the heir of their captive monarch. 

Eighthly ; it is, on the other hand, impossible to vindicate 
the Dauphin himself. His conduct in these controversies was 
improvident, faithless, cruel, and capricious. Yet in his youth, 
and in the resentment hut too justly provoked hy his opponents, 
we may at least discover some apology for his errors, and some 
extenuation even of his crimes. But, 

Lastly ; he the judgment of history on the personal charac- 
ter of Charles what it may, his struggle with the States-G-en- 
eral is important to us chiefly as illustrating some great and 
permanent truths. It shows that in political contests success 
awaits the power which opposes a single and unfaltering pur- 
pose to the shifting and uncertain impulses of its antagonists ; 
that though distrust of our brethren may too often he neces- 
sary for the defense of society, faith in them is the essential 
condition of all true social progress ; that the privileged orders 
of any state, if not themselves strictly united, must fall at the 
first direct encounter with the democracy, at all times their 
most irreconcilable and their most dangerous enemy ; that the 
habitual and intense contemplation of the wrongs we endure 
is not the best method of attaining the rights to which we 
aspire ; that, while ages pass away, man remains unaltered, 
the revolutions of one century differing in circumstances only, 
not in spirit, from those of another ; that it is for this reason 
that history is a science, and not a series of aimless though 
amusing narratives ; and that (as the wise man teaches) " The 
thing that hath been is that which shall be ; and that which 
is done is that which shall be done ; and there is not any thing 
whereof it may be said. See, this is new. It hath been already, 
of old time which was before us." 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 281 



LECTURE XL 

ON THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

HAvma in my last lecture attempted to review the proceed- 
ings of the principal conventions of the States-Greneral of 
France in the fourteenth century, I proceed, as far as the time 
at my disposal will allow, to explain the various attempts and 
the ultimate failure of the States assembled on the fifteenth 
or following age, to maintain the authority of the representa- 
tives of the people, and to restrain the usurpations of the royal 
power. This chronological distinction is not, indeed, very ac- 
curately drawn, as I have yet to notice the measures of the 
States-Greneral of 1380 and 1382, but these may be most con- 
veniently considered and reviewed as introductory to those of 
the reign of Charles YII. and of his two immediate successors. 

When Charles VI. ascended the throne of his ancestors, he 
had not completed his twelfth year. He had, therefore, to 
anticipate the dangers of a long minority ; but, otherwise, no 
prince had ever entered on that high office with what might 
have seemed brighter auguries of a prosperous reign. His 
three uncles, the Dukes of Anjou, of Berri, and of Burgundy, 
disputed the honor of defending the realm and the person of 
their young sovereign. Duguesclin and the other great com- 
manders of the armies of Charles V. had wrested from the 
English nearly the whole of then- conquests in France. By 
the thrift and foresight of that wise monarch, a treasure had 
been accumulated, which the estimates (perhaps the exagger- 
ated estimates) of that age represent as having amounted to 
between two hundred and fifty and three hundred millions of 
francs ; and the Assembly, or States-G-eneral of 1369, had 
placed at the disposal of the crown such permanent financial 
resources as might seem to have banished all reasonable fear 
that France would ever again have to mourn over such a defeat 
as that of Poictiers, or to sign such a treaty as that of Bretig- 
ny. Justly confident, therefore, as it then appeared, in the 



282 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

prospects of his successor, Charles V. had signalized the last 
day of his life by the promulgation of letters patent abolishing 
the hearth tax, and prohibiting the revival of it. 

But these brilliant hopes were almost immediately overcast. 
Louis, duke of Anjou, the eldest of the uncles of Charles YI., 
and regent of France during his minority, had been appointed, 
by the will of Jane, the deceased Q^ueen of Naples, to succeed 
to her on the Neapolitan throne. To prosecute his claim to so 
brilliant an inheritance, Louis stood in urgent need of large 
sums of money. The treasure accumulated by Charles Y. had 
been deposited for safety in the Castle of Melun, and Louis had 
solemnly sworn to guard it for his royal nephew. He, how- 
ever, broke open the chest and purloined the money. 

At this time the patience of the people of Paris had already 
been severely exercised. They had resented the delay in car- 
rying into effect the abolition of the hearth tax, to which the 
letters patent of their dying sovereign had entitled them. 
They had been irritated by an attempt to extend the tax on 
the sales of merchandise to all those petty articles with which 
the public markets were supplied for the daily consumption of 
the citizens. "When, therefore, the intelligence of the robbery 
of Melun reached them, their discontent broke out into actual 
insurrection. A Parliament, as it was called, of the townsmen 
was convened, and marched, at the head of the insurgents, to 
the royal palace. A cobbler distinguished himself by a vehe- 
ment harangue against the farther payment of any taxes what- 
ever. The popular fury rose, and was irresistible. Even the 
chancellor was compelled to provide for his safety by an arti- 
fice with which, during the last sixty years, almost every 
statesman in France has been more or less frequently familiar. 
He assumed the character of a demagogue, and won the mo- 
mentary confidence of the mob by exclaiming, " Kings reign 
only by the suffrages of their subjects, though they may deny 
it a hundred times." In the name of their youthful monarch, 
the terrified courtiers issued an ordinance, complying with 
every demand of the agitators. It repealed all aids and sub- 
sidies imposed since the time of Philip le Bel ; and it declared 
that the payment of such imposts in time past by the people 
should never be drawn into a precedent for the renewed exac- 
tion of them. The triumph of democratic violence was then 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 283 

celebrated with tlie usual demonstrations of popular joy. The 
Jews were plundered of all their property, and the house of 
every tax-gatherer was given up to pillage. 

But France was now again involved in war with England, 
and to supply the funds required to provide for the public de- 
fense, an assembly was convened at Paris in the year 1380. 
It is much debated by the French historians whether this as- 
sembly was, in the proper sense of the words, a meeting of the 
States-G-eneral. But it is perfectly clear that the members 
of it assumed the right of granting large duties on the sale of 
merchandise. They assumed it, however, in vain. The ful- 
fillment of the king's recent pledges was sternly demanded by 
Paris, and by many other great cities. The demand could not 
be silenced, and yet it could not be conceded. To collect the 
existing taxes was scarcely possible. To levy any new im- 
posts seemed altogether hopeless. The war, however, would 
not remit its demands for money ; and so urgent were the ex- 
igencies of the public service, that, at length, in January, 
1381, an ordinance was made in the royal name for the impo- 
sition of new duties, and for the sale of them as a farm to the 
highest bidder. The strength and the violence of the popular 
party had now become so formidable that no one ventured to 
undertake the office of proclaiming this unwelcome enactment. 
At length a man of more than usual address and courage was 
hired to run the hazard. Mounted on a swift horse, he rode 
into the crowd, and amused them by a story of a supposed 
robbery, and by the offer of a reward to any one who might 
detect the criminals ; and then, availing himself of the wonder 
and of the talk which his tale had excited, he abruptly an- 
nounced that the new taxes would be levied on the morrow, 
and, setting spurs to his horse, hardly escaped with his life 
from the rage of the indignant multitude. 

This strange device was the signal for a new insurrection. 
It was called the revolt of the Maillotins. Barricades were 
erected, a civic guard was organized, the prisons were thrown 
open, and, during several successive days, Paris was aban- 
doned to massacre and pillage. 

In the midst of these excesses, an assembly of the States- 
G-eneral was convened, in April, 1382, at Compiegne, when 
the first president of the Parliament of Paris demanded, in the 



284 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

king's name, the indispensable supplies for the conduct of the 
war. The deputies of the Tiers Etat answered hy promising 
to consult their constituents. They did so, and, in due time, 
reported their decision in the following pithy words : " Potius 
mori quam leventur." Again, therefore, Charles VI. was com- 
pelled to publish a retraction of his recent ordinance, in very 
nearly the same language as that which had been extorted 
from him by the first of these Parisian insurrections. Thus 
it seemed to be firmly established, at least in the North of 
France, that, without the consent of the States-Greneral, no 
taxes could be lawfully raised, and that, for the present, their 
consent to any new taxation was not to be obtained. 

The unwonted energy and success of the popular cause in 
France at this time is to be explained by the fact that it was 
an era when, under the influence of some strange sympathy, 
the whole of Europe was agitated by the simultaneous discon- 
tents of all her great civic populations. The insurgent spirit, 
commencing in the Italian Republics, had spread from the 
south to the north of the Alps, every where marking its ad- 
vance by tumult, spoil, and bloodshed. Wat Tyler and his 
bands had menaced London ; and the communes of Flanders, 
under the command of Philip van Arteveld, had broken out 
into open war with the counts, their seigneurs, and with then- 
suzerain lord, the Duke of Burgundy. The Flemings had 
established intimate relations with the insurgents of Paris, 
and every eye in that city was turned toward the Burgundian 
army, which, under the nominal conduct of the young king, 
was advancing to chastise the G-antois. On the issue of that 
attempt, the fate of the royal and baronial power seemed to 
hang in France, not less than in Flanders. The battle of Ros- 
becque decided that controversy in favor of the king and the 
Duke of Burgundy. It crushed the Flemish revolt, and drove 
the Maillotins of the French capital first to panic, and then to 
despair. The victorious army returned to Paris. The citi- 
zens were disarmed. Three hundred of the richest of them 
were drowned or hanged without any form of law. The mu- 
nicipal rights and property of the city were declared to be for- 
feited. A fine of 400,000 francs was imposed on the Parisians 
alone. Penalties scarcely less enormous were levied at Rouen, 
Eheims, Chalons, Orleans, Sens, and many of the cities of 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 285 

Languedoc. The Burgundian soldiers were sent to live at 
free quarters among them. All the imposts so recently abol- 
ished were reimposed by the mere authority of the king. All 
the pledges given by him, or in his name, were set aside as so 
many unmeaning words. The reaction was complete ; and no 
less than thirty years elapsed before France ever again wit- 
nessed the convention of the States-Greneral of the realm. 

In that long interval money was sometimes raised for the 
public service by simple edicts of the crown, but, more fre- 
quently, the concurrence of some of the constituted bodies of 
the state was solicited to sanction or countenance this usurped 
authority. On one occasion the clergy and the University of 
Paris were thus convened to give their assent to the imposition 
of a tax. At another, the deputies of particular cities were 
brought together for the same purpose. But neither the bat- 
tie of Rosbecque, nor the executions and terrors which had fol- 
lowed it, nor the isolated position of the clergy, nor the defense- 
less state of the Bourgeoise, could repress that daring spirit 
which, in the close of the fourteenth and in the beginning of 
the fifteenth century, had so deeply possessed the national 
mind of France. 

Thus in the year 1411, the king proposed to the clergy and 
University of Paris the imposition of a new tax which should 
affect all orders of men indifferently ; when, in the answer 
which they returned through the Chancellor of Notre Dame, 
those learned bodies had the courage or the temerity to de- 
clare that a king who should so abuse his power ought to be 
deposed. The chancellor was prosecuted for his audacious 
words, but the universal enthusiasm in his favor compelled 
the government to abandon the prosecution. 

The reins of royal authority had been strained too far. 
Public dangers and private intrigues at length compelled the 
king and his ministers to relax their grasp of them. Alarmed 
by the perils with which the renewal of the war with England 
was menacing the kingdom, the Dukes 6f Berri, of Burgundy, 
and of Orleans brought their selfish hostilities with each other 
and with their sovereign to a close by the treaty of Auxerre. 
To ratify the compact by the highest possible sanction, it was 
resolved to convene once more the States- General of France, 
and thus to obtain such supplies as might be requisite to repel 



286 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

the invader. The States accordingly assembled at Paris in 
the year 1412, when the Chancellor of Gruienne delivered, in 
the name of his sovereign, an address v^^hioh might well have 
been stereotyped for the use of all ministers who in all future 
times should have occasion to appeal to the liberality of repre- 
sentative bodies. It eulogized the executive powers who stood 
in need of money ; it magnified the benefits which the posses- 
sion of money would enable them to coiifer ; and it ended by 
an earnest entreaty for assistance from those who had money 
to bestow. " The king," exclaimed the chancellor, in his pe- 
roration, "requires of you three things, that is, comfort, aides, 
et secours ;" or, as we should say in English, money — more 
money — and yet more money still. 

The three orders, embarrassed, though certainly not sur- 
prised by the demand, deputed the clergy and the University 
of Paris to prepare and deliver their common answer. The 
choice of men of the gown for what might well appear a haz- 
ardous service was well justified by the result ; for never did 
coat of mail or cuirass cover hearts more dauntless than 
throbbed -beneath the hoods and surplices of those reverend 
churchmen. Listen, for example, to the following passages 
from the speech which, in their name, the Abbe du Moutier 
addressed to the kings and princes before whom the knights 
and burgesses of France had been quailing for the last thirty 
years. " Most of your revenue officers," he said, " are mere 
nobodies, who were poor enough when they entered your serv- 
ice, but have grown rich in the course of it. Only let a va- 
grant become the clerk to a receiver, to a secretary, to a treas- 
urer, or to a general, and forthwith you shall see him ruffed 
and furred with marten skins and other rich dresses, so that 
nobody can know him for the same man. He must needs 
have a rich sash round his loins, and won't dine with any man 
who does not treat his guests to hippocras. And all this waste 
is at the king's cost. It won't do, however, to reform the pet- 
ty offenders only. You must begin with the grandees, and 
give a shake to the Court of Parliament, where sits many a 
worthless member. The aides were increased on account of 
the king's wars ; but now, when the wars have begun to re- 
lax, some of those aides are bestowed by the king on their 
lordships. As he has given them money, so let them give 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 287 

money to liim. Let not tlie king exempt tliem from contrib- 
uting to his service. They are of his own hlood. They are 
his subjects. They hold of him so many noble estates that 
doubtless they will be among the foremost to assist him." So 
spake the University of Paris by the lips of their, delegate ; 
and not unlike this was the dauntless tone in which, in the 
following century, our own University spoke by the lips of 
brave old G-eorge Latimer, who, fearing the face of no man, 
compelled all bad men to fear him. 

But, at that time, Paris boasted a far more eminent son 
than Du Moutier in the devout and learned John G-erson, af- 
terward the ornament and leader of the Council of Constance. 
Not even at that celebrated synod did G-erson ever raise his 
voice with greater energy than when, at the States-G-eneral of 
1412, he asserted the right and the determination of his Uni- 
versity to rebuke the king and the princes for the wrongs 
which they had inflicted on the people of France. " Univer- 
sitas," he demanded, " representat ne universum regnum ? 
Immo vere totum mundum. Q,uare ergo non potest et debet, 
similia verba (veritatis magistra), regi suo et domino liberius 
intonare ? Quid totus diceret Francise populus, quem quotidie 
Universitas, per suos subditos, ad patientiam et bonam obedi- 
entiam regis et dominorum adhortatur, si non asque bene regi 
loqueretur, ut sese benigne, juste, et rationabiliter, erga popu- 
lum suum haberet ? Videretur adulationis et dissimulationis 
factum, nee unquam populus nos audire vellet." 

But of all the learned doctors who signalized their public 
spirit on this occasion, the most remarkable was Eustache de 
Pavily (the public orator, as we should say, of the University), 
whose expostulations were drawn up in the form of a memo- 
rial or written speech, which is still extant. In the name of 
his constituents, De Pavily impeached Jean de Nesle, the chan- 
cellor of the Dauphin, and demanded the seizure of his goods 
and person ; and then addressing himself to Charles, upbraid- 
ed him with his personal extravagance — with the non-payment 
either of the ordinary expenses of his household or of the sal- 
aries of his officers — with the decay of his castles — with the 
neglect of his royal domain — and with the example of his fa- 
ther, who, after nobly employing his revenue in the expulsion 
of the English, had accumulated a vast treasure for the serv- 



288 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

ice of tlie crown. Louis XVI. scarcely received from the Na- 
tional Convention reproaches more bitter, contemptuous, or dis- 
loyal tlian Charles YI. was compelled to hear from the lips of 
Eustache de Pavily, as the organ of that great and learned so- 
ciety, which, strong in the reverence of Europe and of the 
Church at large, maintained its independence and its free spirit 
amid the wreck of every other popular institution. The cour- 
age of the reverend orator may merit admiration ; hut his m- 
vectives were as unjust as they were indecorous, for the sov- 
ereign to whom they were addressed was exempted from all 
personal responsibility, and ought to have been rescued from 
all such indignities, by the madness under which he labored, 
and which seldom knew a partial, and perhaps never a com- 
plete suspension. 

The grievances against which Du Moutier, Grerson, and De 
Pavily raised these indignant expostulations were, however, 
intolerable ; as we may sufficiently learn from the Ordinance 
of the 25th of May, 1413, which, at the instance of the States- 
General, was enacted for the redress of them. It was the 
work of a committee appointed by the States for that especial 
purpose, and is the earliest of that long series of written con- 
stitutions which attest the subtle, the philosophical, and the 
sanguine spirit of the statesmen of France, but which also at- 
test their habitual unconsciousness or disregard of many sim- 
ple and elementary truths, moral and political. Such, for ex- 
ample, is the truth that there has been constituted among men 
a polity not human, but divine — a polity to which all secular 
institutions are so far subordinate that there never can be a 
perennial spring of life in any civil state, the laws and Con- 
stitution of which forbid the free action and the progressive 
development of the state ecclesiastical. Such, also, is the 
truth, that communities, like individual men, are subject to 
duties which they may not abandon, and to laws which they 
may not violate with impunity. And such, again, is the truth, 
that in political society no real or enduring blessing can be of 
an ephemeral growth, but must be gained by sacrifices, and 
perpetuated by tradition, and nourished by reverence, and ma- 
tured by habit, and maintained, among the ruder multitude, 
by much submissive faith and by many honest prejudices. 
Maxims such as these, familiar as they are to ourselves, were 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 289 

as completely hidden from the French people in the fifteenth 
as in the nineteenth century. In May, 1413, therefore, the 
States-G-eneral procured the enactment of a royal ordinance 
establishing a new and a complete system of government. It 
regulated the royal domain, the coinage, the taxation, the mil- 
itary expenditure, the audit of the public accounts, the man- 
agement of the royal forests and navigable rivers, the admin- 
istration of justice, the office of chancellor; and the constitu- 
tion of the Parliament. Just eleven months afterward, the 
whole of this splendid edifice was swept away, leaving behind 
no trace of its existence, except on the parchments on which 
it had been delineated. The sacred right of insurrection was 
once more called into exercise. Yast mobs, who bore the 
name of Cabochiens, usurped for a moment all the powers of 
the state ; and by a strange imitation of the extravagances 
of their predecessors in the reign of John, and a still stranger 
anticipation of the feats of their remote posterity, subjected 
the Dauphin to the very same insult and humiliation which 
Louis XVI. was afterward destined to endure, except, indeed, 
that the cap of liberty worn by the unhappy Louis was red, 
while that which was forced on the head of Charles was white. 

In this reign of terror of the fifteenth century, the Duke of 
Burgundy assumed the character which Philippe Egalite was 
to enact nearly 400 years afterward in the same city. He or- 
ganized the butchers of the capital into a force at once mili- 
tary and fiscal ; and having collected the public taxes by their 
agency, employed those funds in supporting the rabble who 
gathered round his hotel as at once liis partisans and his de- 
fenders. 

The battle of Agincourt was fought m the midst of these 
tumults. It is impossible, and perhaps, if possible, it might 
not be desirable, to repress the exultation with which we dwell 
on that marvelous victory ; yet neither is it desirable to con- 
ceal from ourselves the fact that our heroic ancestors triumph- 
ed over a disunited people — over an undisciplined army — over 
generals at once unable to command and unwilling to obey — 
over princes of the blood who had debased themselves into 
mere demagogues — and over a king whom Providence had 
smitten with an incurable madness. To these causes, more 
than to his own capacity or valor, Henry was indebted both 

T 



.290 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

for that trmmpli and for his subsequent successes. The Bour- 
geois of Paris became his avowed partisans. The Dukes of 
Burgundy and of Bretagne basely acknowledged his authority ; 
and, on the 31st of May, 1420, he was solemnly acknowledged 
as the legitimate heir to the crown of France. 

Yet, even in that hour of humiliation, the French people did 
not abandon the hope of vindicating the constitutional rights 
for which they had so long contended. They obtained from 
Henry a pledge that he would neither impose nor levy any 
imposts upon them except for reasonable and necessary causes, 
nor even then except in accordance with the laws and ap- 
proved oustom§ of the realm. To secure the fulfillment of 
this promiscj/they farther stipulated that the States-Greneral 
should immediately be convened to give tjieir advice and con- 
sent respecting the terms on which the crowns of France and 
of England should be combined in the person of Henry, with- 
out any such union of the two kingdoms as might impair the 
independence of either. 

Henry observed this engagement so promptly that the States- 
Greneral of France met at Paris, in obedience to his summons, 
in the course of the same year. It is, however, a passage of 
history not to be read without shame and indignation, whether 
the reader belongs to England or to France. The States- 
G-eneral, depressed by the public calamities and stimulated by 
the Burgundian party, not only submitted to Henry, but openly 
announced their hostility to the Dauphin. To aid the English 
king in his war against the legitimate heir to the French crown, 
they authorized levies of money in the most oppressive and in- 
iquitous forms. The coinage was to be debased for the profit 
of the treasury ; and all persons possessing property were to 
be compelled to make loans to Henry on such terms as he 
might dictate, and on such security as he had to offer. Not 
satisfied with thus humbling the subjects of Charles ofYalois, 
Henry compelled that unhappy prince, though actually labor- 
ing at the time under his constitutional insanity, to appear in 
person before the States- G-eneral of France, and there to ac- 
knowledge that the treaty of Troyes, which had transferred 
the royal inheritance of his posterity to the English king, was 
his own free and spontaneous act, and to declare that it would 
redound to the praise and honor of G-od, to his own advantage, 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 291 

to tlie weal of the kingdom of France, and to the benefit of all 
his subjects. These lamentable declarations of the insane old 
man were received by the Three Estates with loud applause, 
and (as may be read in Rymer), " eandem pacem laudarunt, 
acceptarunt, et auctorisarunt, referentes humillime gratias 
utrisque regibus." That the Assembly might drain the bitter 
cup to the very dregs, they were then compelled to swear to 
the observance of the treaty of Troyes, and to sanction an 
edict promulgated in the name of Charles, which denounced 
as traitors and as rebels all who should presume to contravene 
that treaty. 

In opposition to these intolerable indignities, a solitary voice 
was raised. It is impossible, in this place, to record, without 
some sympathetic exultation, that it again proceeded from the 
University of Paris, The rude and contemptuous menaces of 
Henry, however, silenced their orator, and the last faint em- 
bers of the ancient spirit of the States-Greneral seemed to be 
finally extinct. Confident in his success, and despising those 
on whom he had thus been permitted to trample, Henry, in 
April, 1421, published in the name of Charles, the titular 
king, an ordinance which imposed on the French people all the 
ancient duties on wines and liquors, the salt tax, and the ad 
valorem duties on the sales of merchandise. 

These memorials of the degradation of their forefathers are 
suppressed by most of the French historians, or are explained 
by the hypothesis that the States-Greneral of 1420 were com- 
posed only of the hired creatures of the Duke of Burgundy and 
of the English king. If in that or in any other supposition 
the wounded national self-esteeiTi of that great people can find 
any solace, it is a consolation of which no Englishman should 
wish to deprive them; for our own ancestors partook largely 
of the degradation which they inflicted, and grievously abused 
the advantages which they had won. They constrained, or en- 
couraged the States-Greneral of France to concur with their he- 
reditary but insane sovereign in proclaiming his own and their 
disgrace ; in denouncing his son as a traitor for resisting the 
cruel enemy of his hovise ; and in extorting money from his sub- 
jects to crush the last efforts of that young and gallant prince. 

That Shakspeare is not only the best, but the only tolerable 
historian of the wars waged by the Roses against France and 



292 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

against eaoli other, has passed from a sportive jest into ahiiost 
a serious article of our received literary creed. At the risk of 
a seeming treason to the majesty of our great dramatist, and 
of a seeming insensibility to our national glories, I must avow 
my regret that he ever wrote those parts of his historical dra- 
mas (if liis they really he) which celebrate the reigns of Henry 
V. and of his less famous, though far worthier son. The most 
exalted genius has really no privilege to propagate miscon- 
ceptions and prejudices hostile to "peace on earth and good- 
X, will among men." That " myriad-minded man" was not, 
after all, exalted so far above the common level of the human 
intellect, that, from those heights, he might teach his worship- 
ers to call evil good, and to put darkness for light. The wars 
of Henry V. were among the greatest crimes which disgrace 
the annals of Christendom, as they drew down upon England, 
in her own civil wars, one of the most swift and fearful ex- 
amples of providential retribution. Henry himself, though a 
lion-hearted captain, has no place among the great masters of 
the art of war. His comrades, who, under the names of Flu- 
ellen and the rest, have so long provoked our merriment, might 
have been exhibited with greater real, though with less dra- 
matic truth, as barbarians who employed the arts of civiliza- 
tion to convert the fair realm of France into an Aceldama, and 
who bequeathed to the most distant generations of Frenchmen 
a hatred of the English name which it is difficult to condemn, 
even when we most regret or censure the excesses to which it 
has occasionally given birth. 

For all these enormous wrongs, however, the Dauphin lived 
to take such vengeance as might have satisfied the most vin- 
dictive hostility. After the lapse of some years from his ele- 
vation to the throne of France, under the title of Charles VII., 
he was able to boast that he had brought to a triumphant 
close the protracted war between the houses of Valois and 
Plantagenet ; that he had established in France a standing 
army ; that he had provided adequate and permanent funds 
for the support of it ; and that, at the expense of the aristoc- 
racy, by whom his father was betrayed, he had enlarged the 
monarchical power to a greater extent than all or any of his 
predecessors. Yet it is difficult to assign to Charles VII. a' 
place among truly great princes. 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, 293 

The first and most indispensable element of greatness in 
active life is a social spirit — that sympathetic temper by which 
a man can render others the willing agents of his own ener- 
getic will, or by which he can render himself the willing agent 
of minds more powerful than his own. It is in this last sense 
only that Charles YII. can with any plausibility be ranked 
among the magnanimous rulers of the world. He had not the 
gift of subjugating to himself the dominant souls or intellects 
of his age, but he had the gift of discerning, of appreciating, 
and of obeying them. 

Thus, in the midst of his constitutional languor aud volup- 
tuousness, he was roused to heroism by two women, who had 
indeed nothing in common but this power of infusing energy 
into the torpid genius of their king — by Joan of Arc, the no- 
blest of heroines, and by Agnes Sorel, to whom the present 
generation of Frenchmen, not satisfied merely to forgive her 
guilt, are enthusiastically erecting statues. Thus, also, the 
military ardor which indolence and the love of pleasure might 
seem to have extinguished in him, was kindled by the influ- 
ence and the example of Richemont and of Dunois. And thus, 
again, in those great administrative duties to which the habits 
of his early life had most indisposed him, he promptly followed, 
though he so lamentably requited, the guidance of Jacques 
CcEur and of Xaincoing. With a character to which, if he 
had lived apart from minds superior to his own, it would 
scarcely have been possible to yield any respect, Charles, sub- 
mitting himself in turn to each of these influences, became the 
author of unrivaled benefits to his people ; the emancipator 
of his native land from a foreign yoke ; the triumphant con- 
queror of her enemies ; and the founder of some of the most 
important of her civil and military institutions. 

The first convention of the States- G-eneral, in the reign of 
Charles YII., of which we have any distinct account (for these 
assemblies were now accustomed to meet and to separate an- 
nually, without attracting any notice from the cln-oniclers of 
the times), was holden at Meun-sur-Yevre. They represented 
only those parts of Southern France which, in the year 1426, 
were still adhering to his cause. Eighty years had now elapsed 
since France had become the seat of war. Even when peace 
had been nominally established, it had been attended neither 



294 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

by security nor by repose. It had merely thrown the dis- 
banded soldiery on the people for support, in a temper as 
rapacious and as formidable as when they were in open war, 
but not as then governed by any wholesome restraints of mil- 
itary discipline. Relief from this intolerable oppression was, 
therefore, the one desire and demand of the States of Meun ; 
and when Charles gave them a solemn assurance of redress, 
they answered by pledging themselves to repay the boon at the 
sacrifice of all the property, and even of all the rights which 
they possessed. They engaged to serve him even to the death 
with their persons and their substance, and with whatever 
else was dear to them. 

Such pledges are usually nothing more than the conven- 
tional rhetoric of representative assemblies when expressing 
their gratitude to the sovereign power. But, in this case, a 
more specific engagement imparted to their language a far 
deeper significance. The States consented that, inasmuch as 
they could not easily be brought together, the king might 
from thenceforward, as often as war should be made upon 
him, do whatever justice and right should require, without 
awaiting another assembly of the three orders ; and they prom- 
ised to obey him with all then power ; to live and to die with 
him in any such quarrel ; and (in their own names and m the 
names of all the absent people of the realm) to place the lives, 
the persons, and the goods of them all, at the service of the 
king against any persons whomsoever. 

At the same meeting, the clergy proposed that a separate 
fund should be formed for the regular maintenance of the 
army — a security against the rapine of the disbanded troops, 
which they very reasonably regarded as of much higher value 
than the most lavish promises which could be addressed to 
Charles, or than the most solemn pledges into which he could 
enter. 

We may, however, safely understand the language thus em- 
ployed, both by the clerical order and by the States-General 
of Meun, not as the expression of any deliberate purposes, but 
as extorted from them by the distress and excitement of those 
disastrous times. They were willing, at the moment, to ab- 
dicate their own privileges, and even to create a permanent 
dictatorship in the person of the king, that, under the shelter 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 295 

of his absolute authority they might be secure from wrongs, 
which rendered all franchises worthless, and life itself a bur- 
den. Their offers and suggestions did not fall unheeded on 
the ear of Charles. They were never really forgotten, nor were 
they eventually barren of the results to which they so obvi- 
ously tended. But he did not at once assume the powers thus 
proffered to him. The time had not yet come for such a de- 
parture from what the great majority of Frenchmen then re- 
vered and cherished as their national constitution. 

Two years after the States of Meun, the one subject of the 
thoughts of all men in France was the siege of Orleans. To 
advance his cause, Charles assembled at Chinon the deputies 
of such parts of his kingdom as at that time acknowledged 
his sovereignty. The Maid of Orleans herself was present 
there, and popular enthusiasm rose to its highest pitch. By 
the unanimous acclamations of the Assembly, an aid was voted 
of four hundred thousand francs. No layman in the realm 
was to be exempt from it. The nobles, nay, even the common 
beggars, were expressly required to contribute to this sacred 
fund. Ere long the siege of Orleans was raised. Accomplish- 
ing the strange presages of her early life, Joan of Arc conducted 
her sovereign to Rheims. The Duke of Burgundy renounced 
the English alliance ; and Charles, exulting in his almost mi- 
raculous success, caught, for the first time, a distinct foresight 
of his approaching triumph over the inveterate foreign enemies 
of his people and of his crown. 

With that prospect seems also to have come the first clear 
intimation of the other approaching triumph which he was to 
win over the domestic antagonists who had so long circum- 
scribed the power of his ancestors, and who, during the two 
preceding reigns, had so often agitated France with tumult 
and insurrection. The first, though incomplete accomplish- 
ment of these hopes occurred at the States- Greneral holden at 
Tours, in the year 1435-6, for confirming the peace which had 
been made at Arras with the Duke of Burgundy. The States, 
on that occasion, submissively concurred in re-establishing 
those imposts against which the Parisians had so often and 
so successfully revolted. 

After three years of tranquillity, during which the contrib- 
utors made no attempt to resist the exaction of those imposts, 



296 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

Charles, emlioldened ty their general acquiescence, convened 
the States- Greneral of Orleans in the month of October, 1439. 
Of all the assemhlies of that nature holden in his reign, it was 
at once the most important and the most brilliant. Victorious 
over the arms of England — the undisputed master of his once 
rebellious capital — and revered by his subjects as their pro- 
tector against wrongs still more intolerable than those of war, 
Charles, shaking off the levity and the indolence of his ear- 
lier days, exhibited himself at the States- General of Orleans 
arrayed in all the outward dignity, and animated by all the 
royal instincts of a mighty sovereign. The chroniclers of the 
age, captivated with the splendor of the ceremonial, labor to 
describe him as surrounded by the lords, the prelates, and the 
commons of his realm ; as attended by the princes of his house 
and by the great officers of his crown ; and as supported by 
E-ichemont and Dunois, and the other commanders who had 
led his troops to victory. They commemorate the orations 
spoken by the chancellor, and they tell of the sanction given 
by the States to the projected peace with England, to the 
ransom of the Duke of Orleans, and to the resumption by the 
crown of all grants by which the royal domain had been di- 
minished. But they pass over in silence, as they had proba- 
bly witnessed with inattention, the momentous proceedings 
which led to the enactment, on the 2d of November, 1439, of 
the celebrated law entitled an ' ' Ordonnance sur la G-endarme- 
rie." Yet a law more important in its principles and in its 
results had never before been advised by the representatives 
of the French people, nor enacted by any king of France. 

We have seen that the clergy in the States of Meun had 
recommended that a fund should be created for the regular 
payment of the troops, and for the prevention of their rapine 
and misconduct. One of the counselors of Charles, and, as it 
is generally supposed, Jacques Coeur, revived this proposal at 
the States of Orleans. He pointed out to the deputies the 
necessity of appropriating in the various provinces funds ade- 
quate to this purpose, that so the troops, wherever stationed, 
might receive their pay with strict punctuality once in each 
month. And he farther suggested that the whole force to be 
so maintained should consist of nine thousand men, each of 
whom should receive ten livres monthly. There is no com- 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 297 

plete contemporary evidence in support of the common opinion 
that the States of Orleans made a permanent appropriation, 
for the support of this force, of one million two hundred thou- 
sand livres per annum, payable from the tallies due to the va- 
rious seigneurs in the kingdom within their respective fiefs. 
That the case was really so is, however, reasonably inferred, 
partly from the language of the Ordonnance sur la Grendarme- 
rie, and partly from the proceedmgs of the States held, fifty 
years later, at Tours. 

The Ordonnance sur la G-endarmerie, by which this resolu- 
tion of the States was carried into effect, reserved to the king 
the exclusive right of appointing all officers having the rank 
of captains, and of fixing the number of their troops. No offi- 
cer was to assume that title, or to command any soldiers in 
war, without the king's express sanction. Every captain was 
to be responsible for the conduct of those serving under him, 
and was to prevent their pillage and ill treatment of the peo- 
ple. The whole force was to be subject to the jurisdiction of 
the king's ordinary judges ; and, if any wrong should be com- 
mitted by any soldiers for which redress could not otherwise 
be obtained, the sufferers were authorized to invoke the aid of 
their fellow-citizens, and, in concert with them, to attack the 
wrong-doers, and deliver them up to justice. Barons com- 
manding garrisons in their own castles were required to main- 
tain them at their own cost, and were made responsible for 
their misconduct. All such barons were forbidden to levy tall- 
ies for victualing their fortresses, excepting such as had been 
immemorially payable to them ; or themselves to retain the 
whole or any part of the tallies or aides granted by the three 
estates an^d levied in their seigneuries — a provision from which 
is drawn the only contemporary proof that such an appropria- 
tion of the seignorial tallies was actually made. The ordon- 
nance closes with another provision hardly less memorable. 
It declares that the king will never pardon any one who shall 
violate this fundamental law ; and adds that, if by importunate 
solicitation he should ever be induced to grant such an indulg- 
ence to such an offender, the judges are to pay no regard to it. 

You will readily perceive the great magnitude of these in- 
novations. The States-Greneral had at once encouraged and 
empowered the King of France to introduce, in favor of the 



298 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

people at large, and to the prejudice of the seignoriai author- 
ity, a reform which the boldest of his predecessors would not 
have hazarded. The soldiery were now, for the first time, sub- 
ordinated to the magistracy and to the law. The barons, and 
the men-at-arms serving under them, were reduced from the 
rank of uncontrolled masters of the people to that of obedient 
subjects of the king. The seignoriai tallies became, not an oc- 
casional, but a permanent tax. They were transferred to the 
royal from the baronial treasuries. The king was placed at 
the head of a standing army, the gathering of which could no 
longer be prevented by the active or passive resistance of the 
seigneurs, and the government of which could neither be dis- 
organized nor usurped by the officers in the immediate com- 
mand either of battalions or of companies. 

The satisfaction with which this great change was regarded 
by Charles himself, seems not to have been unmixed with 
anxiety. He saw in it a conclusive proof of the vast influence 
of the States-G-eneral over the people of France ; and he never 
again convened them. In enabling him to promulgate the 
Ordonnance sur la Grendarmerie, they had given proofs of a 
power, and of a consciousness of power, which, if permitted to 
increase by farther exercise, might as readily abase, as it had 
elevated, the authority of his crown. By rendering themselves 
too useful, they had, in his eyes, destroyed their own utility. 
After the dissolution of the States of Orleans, Charles there- 
fore provided for such exigencies as he occasionally encoun- 
tered by convoking either the Provincial States or Assemblies 
of Notables. One such assembly met at Nevers, in the year 
1441. It presented to him a demand for the redress of griev- 
ances, and advised him to summon the States-G-eneral of the 
kingdom. His answer reminded them that such a convention 
was no longer necessary to legalize his levying of tallies — a 
lesson, or perhaps a sarcasm, by which it was now too late for 
them to profit. 

The Notables, that is, the barons and seigneurs, were indeed 
ere long dissatisfied with the concessions which they had made 
to the king at Orleans. If Philip de Comines be well informed, 
their concurrence had been purchased by money secretly ad- 
vanced by the king for that purpose. But, after some experi- 
ence of the effects of the Ordonnance sur la G-endarmerie, they 



I 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 299 

presented to him earnest remonstrances against the farther 
execution of it. M. Michelet has given an account (and, as is 
usual with him, an amusing and picturesque account) of their 
ineffectual struggles to shake off the fetters which they had 
inadvertently assumed at Orleans. To all their expostulations 
Charles opposed a peremptory and decisive refusal. He was 
now at the head of a force which rendered his decisions, and 
especially his popular decisions, irresistible. 

For the Ordonnance sur la Grendarmerie appears to have 
heen eminently popular, even though it was carried into exe- 
cution by means the least calculated, as it would seem, to 
conciliate the people at large. Since the time of St. Louis, 
the failles had always been apportioned among the contribu- 
tors by officers of their own election, and who, for that reason, 
were called Elus. But, on acquiring a permanent charge on 
the seignorial tallies, Charles assumed the power of nominat- 
ing those officers, and changed their title into that of Elus 
Royaux. It was the ill-omened intimation of an unwelcome 
novelty. The irresponsible power of apportioning the failles 
among the various fiefs and contributors became thenceforward 
the fertile source of many abuses. The grievance was aug- 
mented by the delegation to the Elus Royaux of a judicial au- 
thority in all fiscal cases between the king and the tax-payers. 
The executive and the judicial functions, in these cases, were 
thus united in the same hands ; and the ordinary judges were 
superseded precisely on those occasions on which their arbitra- 
ment was most requisite for the protection of the people. 

The people were, nevertheless, well content. With the nat- 
ural and simple instinct which rejoices in immediate relief, and 
is not embarrassed with the foresight of future and doubtful 
contingencies, they regarded as a most beneficial measure the 
law which delivered them from the insupportable tyranny of 
the disbanded soldiers, who had so long roamed like so many 
hungry wolves over the land, but who, as members of a regu- 
lar and welhpaid army, were thereafter to become subject to 
law and to military discipline. The songs of those times- 
then, as at all times, the best criterion of the state of pubhc 
feelmg in France— celebrate the deliverance of Jacques Bon- 
homme, by this royal ordinance, from the tyranny of the Bra- 
bancjons and from the injustice of the seigneurs. 



300 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

Even at that time there were probahly m France some per- 
sons thoughtful and enlightened enough to perceive that the 
permanent intervention of the Tiers Etat in the government 
of the kingdom was essential to the public good. But it was 
an opinion which as yet had struck no deep roots in the minds 
of the people at large. The cruel and desolating invasions of 
the Plantagenets during open war, and the outrages of their 
disbanded troops during each successive truce, had plunged 
the greater part of France into miseries which, by limiting the 
hopes of the people to an immediate deliverance from those 
sufferings, rendered them indifferent to the sacrifices by which 
that relief was to be obtained. 

The administration of the government of Charles VII. was, 
as I have said, the combined result of many concurrent influ- 
ences upon the mind of a prince peculiarly susceptible of the 
control of spirits more audacious, and of understandings of 
greater capacity than his own. Louis XI., his son and suc- 
cessor, on the contrary, gave an eminent, and perhaps a re- 
pulsive example of a mind so relying on its own inherent vig- 
or as neither to receive nor to desire the support of any exter- 
jial sympathies. Historical portraits, whether drawn by the 
writers of historical romance or of romantic history, are rarely 
entitled to the praise of being faithful likenesses ; yet no one 
can doubt the general fidelity of the pictures of Louis XI., 
which have been bequeathed to us by the two great masters 
of those arts — by Sir "Walter Scott and by Philip de Comines. 
The reason of their success probably is, that the outline or 
mere surface of the character of Louis was so singular and so 
strongly marked that its features could not be mistaken by the 
humblest limner ; while, in discovering the harmony and the 
reconcilement of them all, genius such as theirs found an ap- 
propriate and a worthy exercise. 

It was the pleasure and the habit of Louis to be even osten- 
tatiously exempt from those dependencies on other men, or on 
any outward things, by which ordinary sovereigns are sus- 
tained. He delighted to show that, in his person, royalty could 
not only exist, but flourish, without the aid of the external 
majesty of the crown. Except St. Louis, he was the first, as, 
indeed (with the solitary exception of Louis Philippe), he is 
still the only king of France whose mind was ever prepared 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 301 

for the duties of that high station hy any course of severe and 
systematic study. Before he ascended the throne of his an- 
cestors, he had profoundly meditated the gi-eat Italian authors, 
and the institutions and maxims of the Italian republics. 
From those lessons he had derived a low esteem of his fellow- 
men, and especially of those among them upon whom wealth, 
and rank, and power had descended as an hereditary birthright. 
That sentiment had been cherished by his early and intimate 
intercourse with such of the French nobility as were his asso- 
ciates in his revolt against his father. It was his pleasure to 
assume the manners and appearance of a roturier, and to court 
the society of persons of that class in preference to any other. 
Nor was this a mere affectation' — a mock humility, designed 
to enhance his real greatness by a pretended repudiation of 
it. He not only assumed the dress and manners of an ob- 
scure merchant, but was seriously, and even eagerly inquisi- 
tive about all mercantile affairs, habitually consulting and con- 
versing with traders and mechanics, and busying himself about 
shipping, and manufactures, and mines, and high-roads, and 
markets, without feeling, or affecting to feel, any military ar- 
dor, or any desire for the glory which is to be conquered only 
in the field. His favorites, and even his chief counselors, 
were men of vulgar address and of menial occupations. 

And yet there was nothing base or unkingly in the spirit 
of Louis. He clearly understood, and pursued with inflexible 
steadfastness of purpose, the elevation of his country and the 
grandeur of his own royal house and lineage ; but he pursued 
them with a torpid imagination, a cold heart, and a ruthless 
will. He regarded mankind as a physiologist contemplates 
the living subjects of his science, or as a chess-player surveys 
the pieces on his board. They were, in his eyes, but the ma- 
terials on which his skill was to be employed ; not brethren, 
of whose good or evil fortunes he must himself be the partaker. 
"With no apparent delight in human suffering, he appears to 
have been altogether unmoved by the miseries he inflicted. 
"With no distinct preference for tortuous over direct courses, 
he unscrupulously practiced deceit whenever it seemed best 
to answer his immediate purpose, and apparently enjoyed the 
occupation of weaving for his enemies toils at once too fine to 
be detected and too strong to be escaped. 



302 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

It has Tbeen said of Louis XI., that the appearance of the 
men of the Revolution of 1789 first made him intelligible. 
Before that era, the world had been sufficiently familiar with 
selfish tyrants, hut had seldom seen, and had never understood, 
a pitiless innovator. Louis was the first of the terrible Ideolo- 
gists of France — of that class of men who, to enthrone an idol- 
ized idea, will offer whole hecatombs of human sacrifices at the 
shrine of their idol. The Idea of Louis was that of leveling 
all powers in the state, in order that the administration of the 
affairs, the possession of the wealth, and the enjoyment of the 
honors of his kingdom might be grasped by himself and his 
successors as their solitary and unrivaled dominion. 

The feeble superstition which was united to this relentless 
inflexibility of ambition was not incongruous with it, but the 
reverse. When a will so resolute, and an intellect so perspi- 
cacious as his have surrendered the whole man, with all his 
powers, to the pursuits of this transitory world, the mysterious 
powers of the world of spirits and of the world to come will 
haunt the fevered fancy and oppress the burdened conscience 
with terrors which the mind has not either the leisure to an- 
alyze or the composure to interrogate. The leaden images or 
amulets borne by Louis on his person were but so many vari- 
eties of those mystic spells which Julius recognized in the flight 
of birds, and Napoleon in the Sun of Austerlitz. 

Louis may be considered as having been the living solution 
of the problem — What is the greatest amount of mental sa- 
gacity which can be combined with the smallest amount of 
human sympathy ? or of the problem — What is that point at 
which selfishness darkens the clearest vision, and defeats the 
most subtle scrutiny into the secrets of other minds ? Lack- 
ing the wisdom of love, he was, at length, but seeming wise. 
His understanding, though almost preternaturally acute, was 
continually baffled from his want of that magnetic chord which 
in guileless bosoms vibrates to every genuine feeling, and inter- 
prets every honest motive of those with whom they have to do. 

Once, and only once, during his reign of twenty-two years, 
did Louis XI. convene the States-G-eneral of his kingdom ; nor 
does any incident of his life afford a more curious illustration 
of the peculiarities of his character than is afforded by his 
management of that assembly. 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 303 

Before his accession to the throne, all the great fiefs into 
which France had been divided under the earlier Capetian 
kings had, with the exception of Bretagne, heen either annex- 
ed to the royal domain, or reduced to a state of dependence on 
the crown. But, under the name of Apanages, these ancient 
divisions of the kingdom into separate principalities had reap- 
peared. The territorial feudalism of the Middle Ages seemed 
to be reviving in the persons of the younger branches of the 
royal house. The Dukes of Burgundy had thus become the 
rulers of a state which, under the government of more politic 
princes, might readily, in fulfillment of their desires, have at- 
tained the rank of an independent kingdom. The Duke of 
Bretagne, still asserting the peculiar privileges of his duchy, 
was rather an ally than a subject of the King of France. 
Charles, duke of Berri, the brother of Louis, aspired to the 
possession of the same advantages. And these three great 
territorial potentates, in alliance with the Due de Bourbon 
and the Comte de St. Pol, the brothers-in-law of Louis and of 
his queen, united together to form that confederacy against 
him to which they gave the very inappropriate title of La 
Ligue du Bien Public. It was, however, a title which recog- 
nized the growing strength of the Tiers Etat, and of that 
public opinion to which the Tiers Etat at once gave utterance 
and imparted authority. Selfish ambition was thus compelled 
to assume the mask of patriotism. The princes veiled their 
insatiable appetite for their own personal advantages under 
the popular and plausible demands of administrative reforms 
— of the reduction of imposts — of the government of the peo- 
ple by their representatives^— and, consequently, of the con- 
vocation of the States-Greneral. 

To these pretensions Louis was unable to make any effect- 
ual resistance. At the commencement of his reign he had 
imposed on his subjects a series of exactions as illegal as they 
were burdensome, and the Leaguers had therefore, in the 
commonalty of France, allies who, for the moment, rendered 
them irresistible. The king consequently yielded, or appeared 
to yield, to the necessity of his condition. He assented, in 
terms at least, to all the demands of his antagonists. He 
granted to the Duke of BeiTi the duchy of Normandy as an 
apanage transmissible in perpetuity to his male heirs. He 



304 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 

promised to revoke all the fiscal laws against which the 
Leaguers and the people had protested. He hound himself 
to form a council of government, to he composed of memhers 
of the University, of the Parliament, and of the Bourgeoisie 
of Paris. He admitted the claims of his opponents for gov- 
ernments, privileges, and dignities almost as promptly as they 
advanced them ; and, that nothing might he wanting, he sign- 
ed at Conflans a treaty, hy which he solemnly pledged him- 
self to the observance of these engagements. The confeder- 
ates then laid down their arms. The wily monarch bided his 
time. He had bestowed on them advantages which he well 
knew would destroy their popularity and so subvert the basis 
of their power, and which he also knew the state of public 
opinion would not allow them to retain. To wrest those ad- 
vantages from their hands, it was only necessary to comply 
with their last stipulation, and to convene the States-Greneral. 
They met accordingly, at Tours, on the 6th of April, 1468. 
The leaders of the Ligue du Bien Public absented themselves, 
distrusting probably, when too late, the policy which had in- 
duced them to invoke the appearance of such formidable aux- 
iliaries. In the whole design, and ceremonial, and procedure 
of the assembly, they might indeed trace, with just suspicion 
and anxiety, the working of the subtle spirit of their crafty 
king. The elections, as some maintain, had been so conduct- 
ed, that the same persons were every where chosen to repre- 
sent at once the Noblesse, the Clergy, and the Bourgeois. The 
king (says Comines) had taken great care that such deputies 
only should be elected as were satisfactory to himself, that so 
he might be assisted and not embarrassed by them. Many of 
them were persons of low degree, and some were apparently 
mechanics. The hall of meeting was so arranged that the dep- 
uties of each of the three orders sat promiscuously together, 
and deliberated and voted in common. The utmost freedom 
of speech was conceded to them, and every democratic preten- 
sion was received by Louis with marked and studied defer- 
ence. He judged it impossible to give too great a Aveight or 
too keen an edge to the weapon which he was about to turn 
against his adversaries. 

The deliberations were then opened. The chancellor deliv- 
ered a homily on the decline of passive obedience, founded on 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 305 

the book and the example of Joshua. " The king," says the 
chronicler, "in his o\yn person and in his own words, made a 
clear and notable summary of the questions then depending, 
with respect to the duchy of Normandy, which his brother, 
my Lord Charles, proposed to take for his apanage ; and the 
king said that he was unwilling to decide in his own favor in 
a cause and quarrel in which he was himself engaged, and did 
not think it right to assume that, in such a controversy, he 
could of himself distinguish what was right and equitable, and 
therefore he protested that he was altogether insufficient for 
the decision of such a cause, but referred it to them as a cause 
touching the welfare of the whole kingdom," 

After listening to this extraordinary manifestation of the 
royal diffidence and humility, an orator arose who, one might 
conjecture from his style and his similes, belonged to that 
worshipful society of barber-surgeons for whom Louis had so 
strange a predilection. " States and men," he said, " were in 
common liable to three mortal maladies — the loss of a limb, a 
burning fever, and a hemorrhage. A state labored under the 
first of these diseases when any of her provinces were taken 
away ; under the second, when she was harassed by disband- 
ed soldiers and tax-gatherers ; under the third, when drained 
of her money by remittances to Rome, or by the purchase of 
foreign luxuries." To this diagnosis of the maladies of France 
he added the following therapeutic advice : "Let the grant of 
Normandy to the Duke of Berri be canceled. Let the soldiery 
be compelled to obey the Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie. Let 
the taxes be made uniform, and the salt tax reduced. Let the 
Pragmatic Sanction be re-established. Let sumptuary laws be 
enacted ; and let all parts of exorbitant pensions be revoked." 

One is compelled to regret the now irreparable loss of the 
name of a speaker who coilld express himself so pithily and so 
much to the purpose ; but the reporters of those days, more 
parsimonious than in our own, have suppressed it, and with 
it all the other speeches delivered at the States- G-eneral of 
Tours of 1468, although eight successive days appear to have 
been passed in pronouncing and in listening to them. Bou- 
lainvilliers indeed declares, with the aristocratic indignation 
with which all the sayings and doings of this plebeian assem- 
blage affected him, that the usual decorum of such meetings 

U 



306 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

gave place to tumultuary acclamations, in which no heed waa 
given to the voices of the nobles, nor to those of any individual 
memhers. But, however little we can ascertain what they 
said, there is no doubt at all as to what they did. 

First ; they resolved that " for no earthly consideration, 
whether favor or brotherly kindness, or the obligations of a 
promise, or the convenience of making such a settlement, or 
fear, or the threat of war, or regard to any temporal evil, could 
the king acquiesce in the separation from his crown of the 
duchy of Normandy, or in the transfer of it into the hands of 
any man living from his own." Secondly ; they declared that 
my Lord Charles ought to be satisfied with an apanage of 
12,000 livres of annual rent, and with a titular dukedom or 
earldom ; but that, as the king was pleased to augment it to 
60,000 livres, he ought to be very grateful. Thirdly ; they 
decided that the Duke of Brittany, who was exciting disturb- 
ances in the kingdom and contracting alliances with the En- 
glish, ought to be summoned to surrender the cities of which he 
had possessed himself, or driven from them by force if neces- 
sary — the clergy promising to promote the success of any such 
measures by their prayers — the two other orders pledging their 
persons and their property for the advancement of them. And, 
finally, the States resolved that an embassy should be sent to 
the Duke of Burgundy, to invite him to concur with the king 
in the establishment of ju&tice and order throughout the realm. 
Thus far the deputies had labored for the support of the 
royal authority against the confederates of the Ligue du Bien 
Public. It remained that they should attempt something for 
the benefit of their own constituents. They therefore represent- 
ed to Louis that his troops were ill disciplined ; that justice 
was ill administered ; and that the public finances were ill reg- 
ulated. The admonition was received not only with courtesy, 
but with the most edifying meekness. The seditions pro- 
voked by his enemies had, as he acknowledged and deplored, 
given birth to the abuses of which they complained ; and, that 
they might be effectually remedied, he invited the States-Gren- 
eral themselves to nomirtate commissioners to be employed in 
the great work of reformation. Shouts of grateful applause 
welcomed the proposal. "Who could doubt that the task of 
correcting misgovernment was already in effect accomplished, 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 307 

when delegates of the representatives of the people were called, 
by the king himself, to the discharge of it ? The States-G-en- 
eral of 1468 were therefore dissolved, but not till they had first 
selected the commissioners of public reformation. It is almost 
superfluous to add, that the commission attempted little, and 
effected nothing. 

Louis himself, however, had accomplished all the objects 
for which he had hazarded the convention of the three orders 
of his people. The Duke of Berri resigned his apanage. The 
Duke of Brittany abandoned his English alliance. Louis re- 
sumed all the grants which distress had extorted from him. 
For those advantages he was indebted to the formidable aux- 
iliaries with whom he had just parted. Subservient as they 
had been, they had given proofs of a moral power, with which, 
if their temper should change, it might be perilous to contend. 
The wily monarch descended to the grave without affording 
them another opportunity of engaging in such a contest. 

Few of the sovereigns of France have contributed so much 
to her permanent greatness as Louis XL, and none ever died 
amid a more universal unpopularity or more bitter resent- 
ments. His offenses were of that class for which Frenchmen 
have the least toleration. Cruel, crafty, and cold-hearted, he 
wounded the moral sense of his people, without being able to 
kindle their imagination, even when he promoted their ag- 
grandizement. His death brought to an end a protracted and 
merciless reign of terror. The princes of his house quitted 
the dungeons in which they had been taught to acknowledge 
and to lament the extinction of the boundless privileges which 
had been so long attached to the blood royal of France. The 
noblesse once more breathed freely, and indulged the hope 
that they should not again see their order subordinated to base- 
born usurpers of the high offices of the state, nor have to 
mourn the ignominious destruction, on the scaffold, of families 
which traced their lineage through the most ancient of the 
peers and the greatest of the feudatories of the kingdom. The 
army anticipated a time when French soldiers should no longer 
be superseded in the highest and most honorable services by 
Scotch or Swiss mercenaries, nor condemned to waste their 
martial energies in an inglorious repose. The peasantry, still 
groaning beneath the unmitigated oppressions to which they 



308 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

had so long been subject, had at least nothing to regi'et from the 
loss of their king, as indeed they had nothing to hope from his 
successor. Yet, by two classes of his subjects, though by 
them alone, Louis was probably lamented. The Bourgeois 
lost in him the most zealous promoter of their commercial in- 
terests who had ever filled the throne of France ; while, by 
his death, the men of letters and of enlightened intellects were 
deprived of an associate whom they regarded, if with fear and 
mistrust, yet with genuine and unbounded admiration. From 
the memoirs of Philippe de Comines we may learn how pro- 
found was the impression made by Louis on the few who 
were capable of appreciating the wealth and the variety of his 
mental resources, and of following the eagle glance with which 
he penetrated the folds of the human heart and the labyrinths 
of human policy. 

Louis was gathered to his fathers on the 30th of August, 
1483, and Charles, his only son, a boy of little more than thir- 
teen years of age, reigned in his stead. His mother died four 
months later ; and the administration of the government, in 
the name of the young king, was a prize disputed between 
three principal competitors. They were, first, his eldest sister 
Anne, the Lady of Beaujeu, so named as being the wife of the 
Sire de Beaujeu, a younger son of the house of Bourbon, and 
therefore, though very remotely, a prince of the blood royal. 
The second aspirant to the virtual regency was the Duke 
of Bourbon, the elder brother of Beaujeu, and therefore, of 
course, bearing the same relation to the reigning family. 
The Duke of Orleans, who was at once the presumptive heir 
to the crown and the husband of Jane, the younger sister of 
Charles, was the third of the candidates for that dignity. His 
cousin, the Due d'Angouleme, the next in the line of succes- 
sion, was content to wave his own less considerable pretensions. 

This controversy was at first settled by the kinsmen and 
courtiers of Charles between themselves, in favor of the Duke 
of Bourbon, who accordingly received from the young king the 
offices of Constable and Lieutenant Greneral of France. But 
Bourbon was grievously afflicted with the gout, and proved a 
feeble and incapable administrator of affairs of so much weight 
and difficulty. Alarms of war from Austria and England, 
combining with internal distress and popular discontent — 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 309 

those chronic maladies of France — enhanced at once the per- 
plexities of Bourbon and the ambitious hopes of his competi- 
tors for power. "When, therefore, the voice of the nation at 
large demanded that the States- General should be convened, 
to place the government of France on a surer basis, the kin- 
dred and the ministers of Charles had neither the power nor 
the wish to oppose any obstacle to a measure by which alone, 
as it was universally believed, the nation could be rescued 
from the embarrassments in which it was involved, and from 
the yet greater evils with which it was threatened. 

The States-Greneral of France were, for these reasons, again 
convened at Tours, where they met in January of the year 
1484, if the year be considered as coiTimencing in that month, 
or of the year 1483, if, according to the habits of those times, 
Easter be considered as the commencement of the year. Their 
proceedings, whether we have regard to their tone and charac- 
ter or to their immediate results, constitute the most import- 
ant passage in the history of such assemblies. 

Hitherto the States-G-eneral had met in times of compara- 
tive intellectual darkness ; but now might be distinctly per- 
ceived the dawn of that day which, in the following century, 
was to burst in its full radiance on the nations of Western 
Europe. In Italy, indeed, it had already risen, and had illu- 
minated that hereditary land of genius, not only with poet- 
ry, and art, and literature, but with philosophy also. Eve-n 
the papal chair had been filled by some of the most accom- 
plished scholars and most profound thinkers of that age. Cos- 
mo de Medici had combined in his own person all the munifi- 
cence of a princely merchant, and all the magnanimity and 
wisdom of a patriot prince. If in France itself neither poetry 
nor history had given birth to any immortal works, they had 
at least, under the humbler forms of fable and romance, called 
the national mind into active exercise. Froissart and Mon- 
strelet had recorded the feats of arms of their own days, as 
they would have told of the achievements of Amadis of G-aul 
or of Amadis of Spain ; while another race of authors, taking 
Livy for their model, had invested the warriors of Charles V. 
and of Charles VII. with the demeanor of Roman consuls and 
with the rhetoric of the Roman Forum. Commerce also had 
begun to teach her lessons of comprehensive philanthropy. 



310 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

And Wickliffe, and Huss, and Jerome of Prague, liad so wide- 
ly diffused their opinions, tkat, even in France, the Churcli 
of Rome, awakening from her fancied security, was attempt- 
ing to arrest the progress of knowledge and of truth by her 
habitual and her sharpest weapons of persecution. 

How powerful was the combined influence of all these 
causes on the States-General of 1484 may be learned from the 
Prooes Yerbal of their proceedings, for which we are indebted 
to Masselin, who was at once a canon of the cathedral church 
of Rouen and among the most zealous of the deputies attached 
to the popular cause at that assembly. From him we gather 
that so brilliant a convention of the representatives of the peo- 
ple of France had never before been brought together. On an 
elevated stage or platform, erected in the great hall of the 
episcopal palace of Tours, sat the young king, surrounded to 
the right and left by the constable, the chancellor, and the 
other great officers of state ; behind whom sat two cardinals, 
with the six ecclesiastical peers, and the princes of the blood 
royal as representatives of the six lay peers ; behind whom, 
again, stood twenty nobles of the highest rank. In front of 
this royal and princely assemblage rose two semicircular 
benches, on the foremost of which were ranged such of the 
deputies as belonged to the two privileged orders, the hinder- 
most being occupied by such of the deputies as were them- 
selves bourgeois. A picture of the hall thus apportioned 
among the various sections of the assembly has been repeat- 
edly published, to illustrate and support the theory of some 
recent historians, that it formed a visible adumbration of the 
Legislature convened under the charter of 1814, of which the 
king, the Chamber of Peers, and the Chamber of Deputies 
were all component and indispensable elements. If so, the 
type and the antitype were at least so far alike, that they 
were almost equally transitory. , 

A less doubtful analogy between the two assemblies may 
be found in the presence in each of men of literary renown. 
Measureless, indeed, is the interval between the illustrious 
authors who imparted dignity to the national representation 
under Louis XYIII. and their predecessors who sat among the 
deputies convened at the episcopal palace of Tours by Charles 
YIII. Yet Theology was represented there by Cirey and by 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 311 

John de Yilliers — the Humanities by De la Souze — Astrono- 
my by Denys de Bar — Poetry by John Meschineau — and His- 
tory by Masselin himself : worthy representatives of those va- 
rious faculties, as, on the report of others, I willingly believe ; 
but, whether worthy or unworthy, memorable as illustrations 
of the fact that nearly 400 years ago France assigned to her 
intellectual aristocracy the same share as at the present day 
in the conduct of her most arduous political affairs. 

Another resemblance between Frenchmen of that remote 
age and their descendants in comparatively modern times 
may be discovered in the speech with which the Chancellor of 
France opened the sessions of the States -G-eneral of 1484. He 
paid to their native land that tribute of admiration by which 
that patriotic race have ever fed their national self-esteem, 
and he contrasted French loyalty with English sedition in 
terms like those in which Frenchmen have ever since nourish- 
ed their vindictive hatred and contempt for their neighbors. 
The speaker then passed on to the praises of their young king, 
whom, with curious infelicity of phrase, he described as " Sol- 
omon the Pacific," whose wisdom was, he said, exhibited by 
his early wish to meet his subjects, to make known to them 
the state of his kingdom, and to associate them to himself in 
the management of its affairs. " He entertained not so much 
as a thought of putting his royal hands into their pockets. 
He would maintain his government by means of his royal do- 
main, and would ask no pecuniary aid from them, unless, in- 
deed (as it might happen), such a request should be dictated 
by necessity, and by his zeal for the public good." 

It appears that two hundred and forty-six deputies listened, 
or that, at least, so many were entitled to listen, to these hon- 
eyed words ; and from Masselin we learn that no one of those 
deputies had been elected by the members of any single order 
alone, but that, in their respective counties, bailliages, or sene- 
chaussees, the clergy, the nobles, and the bourgeois had all 
joined together to elect members to represent them in com- 
mon. If the fact be so, it is the more easy to understand 
the motives of another remarkable innovation. The deputies 
agreed to deliberate, not in separate orders, but collectively ; 
that is, thoy resolved themselves into six bureaux, correspond- 
isag with the six nations into which France was then consid- 



312 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

ered as divisible; tlie "nations," namely, of Paris, or the 
duchy of France, of Normandy, of Burgundy, of Aquitaine, of 
Languedoc, and of Languedoil. By each of those bureaux 
was to be prepared a cahier of gi'ievances ; and the six cahiers 
were then to be decomposed, and .remolded into one general 
cahier, by a committee of thirty-six deputies, whose report was 
afterward to be adopted or amended by the collective States- 
G-eneral. 

"Within the narrow limits of time to which I am unavoida- 
bly confined, I can not exhibit even an epitome of the subse- 
quent proceedings, which Masselin has recorded at great length, 
except by attempting to abbreviate the various demands com- 
prised in the ultimate or general cahier, and the various an- 
swers which, in the name of the young king, were returned 
to them. 

First, then, by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bruges, Charles 
YII. had reserved to the kings of France what have been so in- 
appropriately called the liberties of the Grallican Church ; that 
is, the right of the crown to nominate both the bishops and 
other great benefices, and to prevent the remittance of money 
to Rome. Louis XI. had abandoned and revoked this royal 
ordinance. The States-Greneral now demanded the re-estab- 
lishment of it. The royal answer, in substance, was, that any 
farther legislation on the subject would be superfluous, because 
the G-allican liberties were sufliciently secured by the general 
and permanent laws of the realm, from which no particular 
enactment could derogate, and to which no such enactment 
could add any new strength. 

Secondly. The Noblesse demanded that the Ban and Ar- 
riere Ban should be less frequently called out ; that time should 
be allowed them for redeeming the debts with which the exi- 
gencies of the war had compelled them to burden their estates ; 
that they should be restored to their ancient rights of the chase ; 
and that all foreigners should be excluded, in their favor, from 
military commands, and from the government of any of the 
cities or fortresses of France. To these claims the king's un- 
qualified assent was given. 

Thirdly. The complaints of the Commons were preferred 
in terms so simple and pathetic that I regret the necessity for 
confining myself to a brief quotation from them. They said 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 313 

that " during the last thu'ty-four years the king's troops have 
heen continually passing and repassing through every part of 
France — now the gendarmerie, then the noblesse of the Ban — 
at one time the French archers, at another the hallehardiers — 
sometimes the Swiss, and sometimes the pikemen — but all in 
turns living on the poor people. Though hired to prevent op- 
pression, they are themselves the most grievous of all oppress- 
ors. The poor laborer must pay for the hire of the man who 
beats him, who turns him out of his house, who carries off his 
substance, and who compels him to lie on the bare earth, 
AVhen the poor man has with extreme difficulty, and by the 
sale of the coat on his back, managed to pay his taille, and is 
comforting himself with the hope that he may live out the year 
on the little he has left, then comes a new troop of soldiers, 
eating and destroying that little ; and, not satisfied with what 
they find in the poor man's cottage, compelling him with heavy 
blows to seek in the town for wine, for white bread, for fish, 
for groceries, and for other extravagances ; so that, if God did 
not comfort the poor man, and give him patience, he would fall 
into utter despair. In Normandy a great and countless mul- 
titude have died of hunger ; others, in despau", have killed their 
wives, their children, and themselves. From the want of 
beasts of labor, men, women, and cliildren there are compelled 
to yoke themselves to the carts ; and others, fearing that if seen 
in the daytune they will be seized for non-payment of their 
taille, are compelled to labor through the night : all which 
things being considered, it seemeth it) the States- G-eneral that 
the king ought to have pity on his poor people, and ought to 
relieve them from the said failles and charges." 

With this pathetic preface the States- G-eneral demanded of 
the king that all the alienated parts of the royal domain might 
be resumed ; that all useless offices might be suppressed ; that 
the pension list might be retrenched, and the army diminished. 
The cry of misery was, however, but little heeded by those 
who then dictated the answers from the throne. They prom- 
ised nothing except that due care should be taken to resume 
the alienated parts of the royal domain. 

Fourthly came the demands for judicial reformations. The 
States-Greneral proposed that the judges should hold their offi- 
ces for life ; that on each vacancy in their number the remain- 



314 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 

ing judges sliould nominate three candidates, from whom one 
should be chosen by the king ; that the number of judicial 
offices should be diminished ; that they should be no longer 
venal ; that the king should no longer evoke causes from their 
natural judges, and transfer them to special commissioners ; 
that the customs of the realm should be ascertained and re- 
duced to writing ; that all suitors might be allowed to appear 
by their procureurs ; and that no implement (animate or in- 
animate) of agricultural labor should be liable to seizure on 
any process from the courts of justice. To all these demands, 
except those which related to the number and the sale of judi- 
cial offices, the king promised to accede. 

Fifthly. "With regard to commerce, the States-G-eneral de- 
manded, with no very apparent consistency, first, that there 
should be a perfect freedom of trade within the realm ; and, 
secondly, that those frontier fairs and markets should be sup- 
pressed, by means of which the foreigner introduced his wares 
mto France, To either branch of this commercial policy, the 
restrictive as well as the liberal, the States were assured of the 
royal adhesion. 

Such were the grievances of which they sought the redress, 
and such the assurances which they received of their removal. 
It remained to determine what were the pecuniary aids by 
which they were willing to purchase these advantages. I pass 
over reluctantly, but unavoidably, the long debates which pre- 
ceded their ultimate decision. But the terms of that decision 
are too important to be omitted. The States declared that, 
for the assistance of the king in his great affairs, and for the 
payment of his troops, they would give him, as a free and gra- 
tuitous grant, but not on any other ground, the same sum as 
was annually raised for the support of the government of 
Charles YII. (that is, as we have already seen, 1,200,000 livres 
per annum) ; but that this grant was to be in force during two 
years only. Farther, as a special gratification, they voted an 
additional 300,000 livres, payable during one year only. But 
they at the same time requested that he would be pleased to 
convene and hold the States-G-eneral of France within the next 
two ye-ars, at whatever time and place he might see fit, and 
that he would immediately declare what that time and place 
should be, " inasmuch as the said States- Greneral expected that 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 315 

thenceforward no taxes would he imposed on the people until 
they should have been convened and consulted on the subject, 
nor unless the unposition of such taxes should be made with 
their free will and consent, as the guardians and keepers of the 
liberties and privileges of the realm." 

These grants were of course accepted. It is almost as much 
of course to add, that the conditions on which they were thus 
made were not observed by the royal grantee. It seems, in- 
deed, that they were not even noticed in his answer. 

Charles was a boy in his fourteenth year, of feeble health, 
and so little qualified to sustain either the mental or the bodily 
labor of governing a great nation, that he was compelled, by 
sheer fatigue, to break up prematurely the royal session for 
receiving the caliier of the States-G-eneral. After little more 
than two hours had been passed in reading it to him, it be- 
came evident that his strength was exhausted, and tlint the 
chair on which he reposed was as capable as himself of under- 
standing the language of the representatives of his people. 

To those representatives, as to the princes of his house, the 
fiction that such a youth was of full age, and competent to 
reign in his own person, had from the first appeared in its true 
absurdity, nor did they even affect to yield any deference to 
it. They openly and avowedly debated to whom the real re- 
gency of the kingdom should be intrusted. 

It was at that time actually in the hands of the Lady of 
Beaujeu. It was apparently vested in a council of fifteen, 
composed of the princes of the blood, and of several of the for- 
mer ministers of Louis XI. But that council was itself divided 
into two parties ; the one in the interest of the Bourbons, the 
other attached to the Duke of Orleans. To throw the whole 
preponderance of authority into the hands of the duke, the 
president of the States-G-eneral (one of his partisans) propased 
that the administration of the government should be commit- 
ted to a council of twenty-four ; that is, of nine persons to be 
selected by the States-G-eneral themselves, in addition to the 
fifteen who were actually seated there ; that the choice of the 
nine should be made by each of the six " nations," but that 
the Parisians (who were Orleanists) should be allowed to 
choose a greater number than any other " nation," in propor- 
tion to their superiority in wealth and population to any other. 



316 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

To avoid this disparity, the other five " nations" concurred 
in a resohition to establish a council of twenty-six, and, for 
that purpose, to reduce the fifteen actual counselors to eight, 
and to add to the eight eighteen more, of whom each of the 
six " nations" was to elect three. Orleans, or his adherents 
in the States-Greneral, and especially the Parisian party, op- 
posed this project by an unqualified denial of the right of that 
assembly to interfere at all in the nomination of a regent. 
They maintained that, in the case of the incapacity of the 
king, the princes of the blood, and especially the heir pre- 
sumptive to the crown, had an inherent right to assume the 
provisional exercise of the kmgly office. 

There is, indeed, no new thing under the sun. "When, in 
the year 1788, the Prince of "Wales, by his friends in the 
House of Commons, claimed, as of right, the regency of G-reat 
Britain, the indignant and democratic protest of William Pitt 
might have passed for an imitation of that which, in the year 
1484, had been made, in the States-G-eneral of France, by 
Philip Pot, against the corresponding pretensions of the Duke 
of Orleans. 

After denying the existence of any law which devolved the 
government of France on the princes of the blood during the 
minority or incapacity of the king, and after observing that 
the very expression, " princes of the blood," was susceptible 
of many different meanings, Pot exclaimed, "Above every 
thing else be assured, that to the people, and to them alone, it 
belongs to determine any question affecting the welfare of the 
commonwealth at large ; that the government of it has been 
confided to our kings by the people ; and that they who have 
possessed themselves of that power by any other means than 
the consent of the people, are nothing else than tyrants and 
usurpers. It being evident that our king is unable to govern 
the state in his own person, the government of it reverts to 
the people from whom he received it, that so they may resume 
that which is their own. By the people I do not mean the 
populace, or merely the commons of the realm, but all French- 
men of every condition. Even so, under the name of the 
States-Greneral, I mean to comprise the princes themselves ; 
nor do I regard any inhabitant of France as excluded from the 
meaning of that comprehensive term." 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 317 

The regency debates in France, as in England, were both 
long and tedious. In the progress of them the States-General 
were about to resolve on a joint regency, to be divided between 
the Duke of Orleans and the Lady of Beaujeu ; a measure 
which, combined with that of a council of twenty-six, would 
have placed the real administration in the hands of the eight- 
een selected deputies, to the exclusion both of the princely and 
of the Parisian aspirants. In an evil moment for his own am- 
bition, Orleans attempted to parry this attempt by a message 
to the States, in which he advised them to interfere no farther 
than by merely adopting a resolution that the Sire and the 
Lady of Beaujeu should retain the position which they had 
occupied near the person of the king. To this advice the 
Beaujeu or Bourbon party gladly, though with affected reluct- 
ance, gave in their adhesion. The deputies, jfinding that the 
princes were thus at length unanimous, adopted the advice of 
the Duke of Orleans, though not without the ardent resistance 
of the " nations" of Normandy and Burgundy. 

The cahier, so far as respected the regency, was therefore 
drawn up as follows : It acknowledged the competency of the 
king to dispatch all the public business, so long as he should 
act in conformity with the advice of his council. It request- 
ed him to preside as often as possible at their deliberations, 
that he might be trained betimes to the conduct of affairs. In 
his absence the Duke of Orleans was to preside. In the ab- 
sence of Orleans, the presidency was to belong to the Duke of 
Bourbon. In the absence of both dukes, it was to pass to the 
Sire de Beaujeu. The other princes of the blood were to sit 
and vote in the council according to their rank. Twelve ad- 
ditional counselors were to be selected from the six "nations," 
but the selection was to be made by the king 'and the princes. 
M. de Sismondi shall explain the real character and effect of 
this policy. 

" The deputies," he says, "had risen to the height of the 
loftiest and the noblest constitutional principles. But, after 
having announced that the whole sovereign power was their 
own, they abandoned themselves to the guidance of chance, 
by remitting that power into the hands of a child, without ap- 
pointing for him a regent, a council, or a tutor. After having 
resolved that the nations should be represented in the Royal 



318 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

Council by at least twelve members of tbe States, they aban- 
doned the choice of those members to the king himself; a de- 
cision dictated by the narrow and selfish calculations of the 
section of Paris, which doubted not that the royal choice would 
fall on some of the inhabitants of their own city." 

The States-G-eneral of Tours were then dissolved. Anne of 
Beaujeu became the undisputed, though not the nominal re- 
gent of France. To the demands of the deputies, that no du- 
ties should be raised without their consent, and that they should 
be again convened within two years, no answer whatever had 
been returned. Before one of those years was over, the chron- 
ic disease of the royal government of France reappeared. The 
revenue was again insufficient to meet the exigencies of the 
public service. In the name of the young king, the Lady of 
Beaujeu therefore promulgated an ordinance rendering perma- 
nent the additional revenue of 300,000 livres, which the States 
had expressly limited to a single year. After the lapse of the 
two years, during which alone the States had authorized the 
levying the tallies, she promulgated another ordinance, author- 
izing the continued exaction of them. She required the Par- 
liament of Paris to register these ordinances, and they imme- 
diately obeyed. Thus, by the mere registration by a court of 
justice of a royal ordinance, and without any other formality, 
the property of the people at large was brought within the 
grasp of their sovereign. This great revolution was effected 
silently, without resistance, and, as it might seem, without 
notice, at the very moment when the most powerful assembly 
of the States-G-eneral which France had ever seen had assert- 
ed, as an incontrovertible principle, that no taxes could be lev- 
ied on the people of France except with the consent of their 
representatives. The king had thus become the single and the 
absolute legislator in all fiscal matters ; for, at this period, the 
Parliament of Paris had not asserted their pretension to rep- 
resent the States-G-eneral of the nation during the intervals of 
their successive assemblies. They did not then even claim 
the right of remonstrance. The University of Paris, indeed, 
requested them to assert that right ; but their answer, as quot- 
ed by Parquier, was, that it was their office not to solicit jus- 
tice, but to do justice ; and that, in a case where they were 
judges, they could not degrade themselves by becoming suitors. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 319 

"We have already had occasion to see how much, in later 
times, the Parliament of Paris elevated their tone, and en- 
larged their sphere of action with regard to royal ordinances. 
But their subserviency to Amie of Beaujeu frustrated all the 
labors of the States- G-eneral of Tours. Eighty years rolled 
away before France ever witnessed another free assembly of 
the representatives of the people. In that period the monarchy 
had, in the fullest sense of the word, become absolute. After 
the lapse of other centuries, the Parliament of Paris, reversing 
the decision of their predecessors, discovered and declared their 
own incompetency to^egister any of the fiscal edicts of Louis 
XVI. There are, even yet, some surviving among us who re- 
member the commencement of the convulsions which imme- 
diately followed. It is doubtful whether there is among us 
any one who will live long enough to witness their effectual 
termination. 



LECTURE XIL 

ON THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

Suppose a man, thoroughly conversant with the histories of 
Greece and of Rome, and not unacquainted with that of En- 
gland, but profoundly ignorant of the history of France (the 
supposition is not really so extravagant as it may sound) — 
suppose such a man to be told that, from the year 1302 till 
the year 1789, the acknowledged law and constitution of that 
kingdom had confided the right of imposing taxes, for the sup- 
port of the government, to an elective assembly fairly represent- 
ing the clergy, the nobility, and the commons of the realm, and 
to that assembly alone — that, in point of fact, such an assembly 
had been convened at every great crisis of the national fortunes 
throughout the three first centuries of its existence, and not 
seldom, during that period, from year to year — that, at differ- 
ent epochs, such assemblies had made or sanctioned innova- 
tions of the utmost importance both in the polity and in the 
policy of the state — that this part of the national constitution, 
though frequently allowed to fa]) into disuse, had never become 



320 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

obsolete, but had always lived in the memories and in the hearts 
of the people ; and yet, that, in the immediate vicinity, and 
under the shelter of it, had grown up a despotism, hearing to 
that of Turkey a resemblance as close as can subsist between 
the governments of the most and of the least civilized of the 
members of the great community of nations. Who can doubt 
that such an auditor would consider such a statement merely 
as a fiction, alike incredible and dull ? Yet, if our supposed 
skeptic, being provoked to search for himself, should find that 
the narrative was strictly true, and should be compelled to ad- 
mit the real coexistence of social phenoi^ena, in appearance so 
contradictory, he might still be reasonably curious and per- 
plexed to discover the reconcilement of them. To a certain 
extent, I have already attempted to suggest it, and I am now 
about to offer such farther explanations as the proceedings of 
the States-G-eneral in the sixteenth century seem to require. 
But, before we advance to that subject, it may be convenient 
to take a brief retrospect of the progress which we have al- 
ready made. 

Under the guidance of Le Cooq and the patronage of Mar- 
cel, the States of the reign of John had anticipated the ideas 
of the great revolution. The Convention itself did not pro- 
claim more distinctly the dogmas of political equality, unity, 
and uniformity. The people were hailed as " sovereign," with 
equal enthusiasm, by their representatives at either epoch. 
To convert the States-G-eneral into a permanent national as- 
sembly, and to centralize all the powers of the government at 
Paris, were maxims inculcated and acted upon with the same 
zeal in the fourteenth and in the eighteenth centuries. In the 
earlier as well as in the later of those ages, they had their 
cap of liberty and their new national flag, the only difference 
being that those emblems of popular dominion were distin- 
guished at first, not by three colors, but by two. And, as if to 
complete the resemblance between the Parisians of the time 
of John and those of the time of Louis XIY., the first had their 
Philippe Egalite in the person of the King of Navarre, as they 
would have had their Robespierre also in the person of Marcel, 
if the Dauphin Charles had been of the temper of his successor. 
From this singular parallelism some modern French writers, 
of no vulgar authority, have drawn the conclusion that Le 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 321 

Cooq and Marcel, and their associates, were what is called in 
Erance " grands organisateurs" — constitution makers, that is, 
not unworthy to be ranked with those ephemeral French re- 
publics and monarchies which have so often appeared and dis- 
appeared during the last sixty years. I have no disposition to 
dissent from this eulogium ; but the inference which I should 
deduce from it is, not that the innovators of the fourteenth 
century were men eminent for their understanding or for their 
public spirit, but that " organization" is a science or an art in 
which eminence may be easily attained by men of ready wits, 
of shallow minds, and of audacious spirits. It is not, after all, 
a very diihcult problem how to decompose human society into 
its elements. Nor is it a very arduous task to rearrange those 
elements on the naked principle of subordinating every mem- 
ber and every movement of the state to the physical force and 
the arbitrary will of the multitude. A great deal of hardi- 
hood united to but a slender reach and combination of thought, 
may accomplish such ends as these. The real test of political 
wisdom is found in precisely reversing this process. It aims 
to produce the greatest attainable amount of good by means 
of those organs of government which habit has made familiar, 
and which antiquity has rendered venerable. Tried by this 
test, Le Cocq was as arrant a sciolist as Sieyes, and Marcel 
as great a blunderer as Danton. 

The revolutionary usurpations of the States- G-eneral of John 
were fatal to the constitutional liberties of France. They 
drove the friends of order and of peace to seek the fatal shelter 
of absolute power. When the clergy and the nobles abandon- 
ad the States of Paris in July, 1357, their secession secured 
not merely the ultimate, but the early preponderance of the 
crown. Within four months from that time many of the 
chief cities of France had proffered to Charles the aid which 
the States had refused ; and Paris herself at last asserted her 
wonted pre-eminence over the rest of France by a more abun- 
dant zeal in coming with similar offers to the rescue of the 
regent. Six months later, Le Cocq was impeached for his 
abuse of his freedom of speech as a deputy; and, within anoth- 
er year, all the royal counselors, whom he had himself im- 
peached, and compelled the Dauphin to dismiss, were publicly 
reinstated in their offices. 

X 



322 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 

When the Dauphin, under the title of Charles Y., ascended 
the throne, we need not douht that he brought with him to 
the administration of affairs an indelible remembrance of the 
dangers and humiliations of his youth. Nor could that great 
popular organ of the French government have provoked a more 
subtle or a more dangerous enemy ; for Charles had learned 
in adversity some lessons, not perhaps of wisdom, but at least 
of foresight and prudence. He had been taught to dread a 
direct conflict with the national representatives, and had dis- 
covered that it was easier to undermine their constitution than 
to resist their power. His hostility to them was, therefore, 
conducted and veiled under the form of an innovation, which 
studiously confounded the States- Greneral either with the 
Eoyal Council or with the Parliament of Paris, and which oc- 
casionally combined all those tliree bodies together. During 
the whole of the reign of Charles V. the deputies were thus 
yoked with associates more docile than themselves, and more 
subservient to the royal will, and therefore, at that period, 
made no attempt to revive the pretensions by which his re- 
gency had been agitated. 

But when that sagacious and resolute prince made way for 
his son and successor Charles VI., the claims and the authori- 
ty of the States- G-eneral (assisted by the revolt of the " Maillo- 
tins") having revived, they extorted from the nev\^ king a form- 
al renunciation of all the novelties introduced since the reign 
of Philippe le Bel, and an equally formal restitution to the na- 
tion at large of all their " franchises, liberties, privileges, and 
immunities." The battle of Rosbecque, however, enabled 
Charles, though the feeblest of all the princes of the house of 
Yalois, to gratify the hereditary dread and resentment with 
which he regarded the States-Greneral, and, during thirty suc- 
cessive years, to suppress their assemblies altogether. 

Humbled by these successive defeats, and perhaps render- 
ed forgetful and unconscious of the magnitude of their own 
powers by this protracted disuse of them, the States-Greneral 
of December, 1420, enabled the foreign usurper, Henry V., to 
debase still farther the representation of the French people by 
lending themselves as his willing instruments in the indigni- 
ties to which he subjected their unhappy sovereign, and in the 
cruel wrongs which he inflicted on their constituents. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 323 

'VVitli tlie crown of liis ancestors Charles YII. inherited the 
tradition of distrust and antipathy which these proceedings of 
the States-General during the three preceding reigns had pro- 
voked, and might almost seem to have justified. Charles, or 
rather his minister Le Coeur, was indeed a great and success- 
ful '^ organisateur." But they undertook to organize that pre- 
cise form of human society which at once the most urgently 
requkes and the most readily admits the exercise of such plas- 
tic skill ; for he who would mold a national army to the pur- 
poses of its existence, has to he guided in that work hy the 
simplest of all laws and by the most obvious of all principles. 
Implicit obedience is the one rule of conduct, and honor the 
suigle spring of action to be taken into his account. Conse- 
quently, in the composition and structure of military society, 
a law-giver may safely, and even wisely adhere, with inflexible 
rigor, to the rules of what may be called the science of social 
dynamics. Such was apparently the judgment and the habit 
of Le Coeur. 

The States of Orleans of 1439 seem to have been captivated 
with tlie symmetry and the systernatic completeness of his 
military projects. They were delighted witli the prospect of 
the exact discipline to which the lawless men-at-arms were to 
be subjected by the provisions, at once so peremptory and so 
comprehensive, of the proposed Ordonnance sur la G-endarme- 
rie. They were either heedless or ignorant of the deep polit- 
ical significance of that great measure. The very instinct of 
parsimony failed them. They forgot that their proper function 
was only to supply the deficiency of the king's hereditary rev- 
enue or royal domain by '' subsidies, aids, subventions, suc- 
cors," or by whatever other equivalent terms their temporary 
grants might be called. They overlooked the warning con- 
veyed by the very style and structure of this constitutional 
phraseology against the error of assigning to the crown any 
new, permanent, and irrevocable resources. They recklessly 
placed the purse and the sword, at the same moment, in the 
hands of the king ; not, as it might seem, observing that they 
were thus emancipating him from their own control, and sub- 
jecting themselves and their constituents to the absolute power 
of their present and of their future sovereigns. 

But to Charles himself, and to Louis, his keen-sighted son, 



824 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 

no consequence could be more clearly perceptible. Charles 
never again summoned the States-General to his assistance ; 
nor did Louis ever convene them except when he needed their 
support against the princes of his house. 

To obtain that support, the subtle monarch assailed them at 
once on each of the two vulnerable sides of all popular assem- 
blies. He gratified both their plebeian jealousy of the power 
of the great, and their plebeian thirst for the adulation of the* 
great. He called on them to decide whether France should be 
dismembered in favor of one great prince ; whether traitorous 
alliances should be contracted with England by a second ; and 
whether the royal treasury should be exhausted by a ruinous 
dotation for a third. Not merely assuming the appearance and 
manners of a roturier, but contriving to impress a correspond- 
ing aspect on all the proceedings of the deputies, Louis, with 
irresistible lowliness, avowed his own incapacity to determine 
these great and arduous questions. Wha,t wonder that Adam 
Fumee and Mathurin Baudet, with the rest of their worship- 
ful brotherhood, immediately resolved to support their unas- 
suming king against the dukes and barons of the Ligue du 
Bien Public ! Or what wonder that, when humbly and cour- 
teously requested by him to appoint their own deputies for 
promoting any reforms which they might think desirable, the 
Bourgeois, in the exultation of the moment, forgot that, as the 
misconduct of Louis himself had rendered reformation neces- 
sary, so his power, when rescued from any counterpoise of 
theirs, would as certainly render it impossible ! Charles YH. 
overreached the representatives of the people by splendid 
schemes, Louis XL by adroit flatteries. The one conciliated 
their imagination, the other their vanity. In either case the 
concentrated powers of a single mind triumphed, as usual, over 
the discordant passions and purposes of a multitude of minds. 
They had yet to learn that no such multitude can conduct it- 
self steadfastly or successfully except under the guidance of a 
single leader and of a recognized head. 

The States-G-eneral of Charles VIH. came together with 
ideas far more mature, and Math a much more correct appre- 
ciation of their duties and of their powers. They were the first 
assembly of that kind in which all the orders appear to have 
acted with perfect mutual good understanding. They were 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 325 

the first which knew how to reconcile a due regai-cl for the 
liherties of their constituents with a due respect for the au- 
thority of the crown. They were the first to whom really 
great orators addressed eloquent and enlightened expositions 
of the interest and duties of the various members of the state, 
and of the relations in which they severally stood to each 
other. They firmly established both the precedent that it be- 
longed to them to dispose of the royal authority in case of the 
incapacity of the reigning monarch, and the principle that they 
possessed that right as representing the people at large, who 
were the authors, and the ultimate depositaries of all political 
power. And, finally, they limited their grants to the royal 
treasury to a very short period ; and they did so, not so much 
from parsimony, as on the constitutional ground and demand 
that, before the lapse of that period, they should be reassem- 
bled, and resume the consideration of the exigencies of the 
public service. 

Such is their just praise. It is their no less just dispraise 
that their proceedings were fluctuating, irresolute, and unskill- 
ful. It would seem as though the long intermission of the 
meetings of the States-G-eneral had prevented the deputies 
from learning or remembering the art of parliamentary tactics. 
They possessed no party combinations, no expert or acknowl- 
edged leaders, and no well-defined objects or line of policy. 
But, above all, they did not proceed in combination or in con- 
cert with any other of the great powers of the state, adminis- 
trative or judicial ; or, rather, they were in actual, though in 
unavowed hostility to each of those powers. No sooner had 
they ceased to deliberate and to act in their collective capaci- 
ty, than the king and his ministers set at naught their most 
important decisions ; and the judges, or Parliament of Paris, 
distinctly recognized the lawfulness of royal ordinances, pro- 
mulgated in direct opposition to their most solemn decrees. 

Yet the States-General of Charles VIII. had given proof of 
such powers, and had proclaimed such principles, as effectu- 
ally induced him to dread and deprecate their reappearance. 
He never again convened them. Heavy as were the expenses 
of his Italian wars, he defrayed them partly by his hereditary 
revenue, and partly by taxes imposed by his own authority *, 
and, when it would have been unsafe to strain that usurped 



326 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

power any farther, then by loans raised in anticipation of liis 
revenue. The national passion for military triumphs which 
then first, in modern times, developed its disastrous tendencies 
in France, then also first gave birth to that apparently msolu- 
ble problem, How the glories of the arms of France can ever 
be reconciled with the liberties of the French people. 

Louis XII., like his predecessor, conducted his wars in Italy 
by means of loans, and of alienations of the royal domain ; for 
not only did his wise and generous frugality render him inde- 
pendent of the aid of the States- G-eneral, but, strange as it 
may sound, it enabled him to enhance his popularity by dis- 
pensing altogether with their presence. To hold such assem- 
blies, and to demand pecuniary supplies from the people, were, 
in that age (indeed in all ages), acts so indissolubly connected 
with each other, that not to hbld them had come to be regarded 
as a kind of patriotic forbearance. The assembly of Notables 
which hailed Louis as " the Father of his people" did not for- 
get his merit in never having been compelled to meet the rep- 
resentatives of his people. 

"When, in his turn, Francis I. sought for glory to the south 
of the Alps, he did not entitle himself to. the same grateful 
eulogy ; for though, like Louis XII., he never brought together 
the Three Estates of his kingdom, yet both at Cognac and at 
Paris he invoked the aid of the Notables to extricate him out 
of the calamities which followed on the defeat of Pavia. The 
first of those assemblies supported him in breaking his faith 
to Charles ; the second of them enabled him to raise the ran- 
som required to rescue his son fr6m the hands of that mon- 
arch. The States were, however, so far indebted to Francis, 
that, by never allowing them to meet, he made others, and 
not them, the instruments of the public loss, and of the na- 
tional repudiation of his own sworn promise. 

Henry II., in his fiscal distress, imitated and improved on 
this example of his father. Instead of issuing a summons for 
the election of deputies, as in former times, he himself nomi- 
nated them ; and his mock States-G-eneral were farther distin- 
guished from all genuine assemblages of that kind by the ap- 
pearance there of a fourth estate ; that is, of the various Par- 
liaments of France as represented by nominees of the crown. 
The great object of tliis assemblage was to obtain a contribu- 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 327 

tion from tliose privileged classes who were exempt from tlie 
tailles and from most other extraordinary imposts. Nor was 
the attempt unsuccessful. The enthusiasm excited by the 
recent capture of Calais, and the zeal of the Parliaments to 
requite the king for having elevated them to the rank of a new 
estate of the realm, opened the hearts and the purses of the 
members of this anomalous hody. 

But when Henry had fallen hy the lance of Montgomery, 
and Francis, his son, reigned' in his stead, such evasions of the 
ancient laws and constitution of the kingdom ceased to he any 
longer practicable ; for the time was not yet come when the 
kings of France were to assume the plenitude of the power of 
raising taxes without the consent of their people. By Charles 
VIII., by Francis I., and by Henry II., the power had indeed 
been exercised, but it was with the timidity and hesitation of 
usurpers, and with the too plausible apology that they were at 
the same time promoters of the glory of France. But the scene 
and the actors in it were now to undergo a total change. 

The seventy-eight years which had elapsed since the dis- 
solution of the States-G-eneral of Tours by Charles VIII. had 
been a period of internal progress, though of external disaster. 
The blood and treasure of France had been profusely squan- 
dered in the Italian wars, in the rivalry with the house of 
Austria, and on the fatal fields of Pavia and St. Quentin. 
These calamities had at length passed away, and unequivocal 
indications of increasing prosperity were every where visible. 
But the blast of a new trumpet of woe was about to be heard 
throughout that devoted land. The wars of religion drew near, 
and already the hostile bands of the Huguenots and the Cath- 
olics were arrayed against each other for that deadly conflict. 
The civil and military conduct of the cause of the Reformers 
had been committed to the princes of the house of Bourbon. 
The Catholics acknowledged the chiefs of the house of Lorraine 
as their guides and champions. At the head of the. Mediating, 
or, as they were called, the Political party, were the Constable 
Montmorency and the Chancellor I'Hopital. The king himself 
was a cipher — a mere boy in his sixteenth year, in tutelage 
to his mother, Catharine of Medici, whose Italian guile found 
ceaseless exercise in maintaining her own dominion by the ad- 
justment of the balance between the contending factions. Nor 



328 



THE STATES-GENERAL OF 



were tlie other great sovereigns of Europe passive spectators 
of the brooding tempest. Philip II. had pledged himself to 
the defense of the Catholic, Elizabeth and the Reformed states 
of G-ermany to the support of the Calvinistic arms. But, ere 
those pledges could be redeemed, the Duke of Guise and his 
brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, by the defeat of the Protest- 
ant conspiracy of Amboise, had risen to an absolute supremacy 
in the administration of the government of France, and had 
constrained the wily Catharine, at least for the moment, to 
grace and to partake their triumph. 

But with the powers came the responsibilities of that liigh 
position. The public revenue was inadequate, by two and a 
half millions, to meet the annual expenditure for which the 
G-uises had now to provide. They had to choose between the 
unpopularity (so hazardous at such a crisis) of raising the 
necessary supplies by edicts, to be issued in the name of the 
king alone, and the hazard (so formidable to the French court 
at all times) of convening the now almost obsolete assembly 
of the States-General of France. Yet, from such a convention, 
the house of Lorraine not unreasonably hoped to derive at once 
pecuniary resources and popular support ; and, in that expect- 
ation, they became the avowed advocates of what then seem- 
ed so bold a policy. On the other hand, Antoine, king of Na- 
varre, and his brother, the Prince of Conde (the two chiefs of 
the house of Bourbon), anticipated, from the same source, the 
triumph of their Protestant adherents, and their own elevation 
to the political authority which Catharine was exercising in 
passive subservience to the Princes of Lorraine. Catharine 
herself hailed the prospect of their meeting as the most prob- 
able means of depressing each of the rival houses, and of con- 
firming her own questionable powers, while the Political party 
believed that the authority of the constable and the eloquence 
of the chancellor would enable them to subjugate the deputies 
to their pacific and constitutional policy. Under the mfluence 
of those opposite, though concurrent motives, the leaders of all 
the great rival parties in France unanimously advised the king 
to convene the States-General of the realm. But the people" 
to whom the royal citations were addressed, were as much in- 
fected as their rulers by the epidemic fever of political excite- 
ment. From De Thou and Regnier de la Planche— each of 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 329 

tliem a contemporary historian — we learn tliat, from one end 
of the kingdom to the other, the electoral meetings rang with 
the characteristic eloquence of France, and that the vices of 
the clergy and the crimes of the privileged orders were the 
invariable themes of this popular oratory. 

For example, John Bazin, an advocate of Blois, in the course 
of his invectives on such an occasion, having exclaimed that 
what he had spoken was felt, and would be avowed by his 
constituents — the people — was interrupted by the presiding 
bailli with the question. And what mean you by the people ? 
"I mean," replied Bazin, "that bestia multorum capitum of 
whom you, M. le President, are yourself one." The speech 
delivered by another advocate, Grrimaudet by name, at Angers, 
might pass for a communist oration at Paris of the year 1848. 
It denounces the courts of justice as shops for the sale of ju- 
dicial sentences ; the priests as hireling absolution mongers ; 
the patrons of benefices as simoniacal debauchees ; and the 
nobles as so many robbers and cowards, sheltering their in- 
famy beneath their great hereditary titles ; while the Tiers 
Btat, exempt from all blame, but laboring under every form 
of oppression, bore all the brunt of war, and endured all the 
burdens of peace, producing, by their toils, wealth in which 
they were allowed no share, and maintaining, by intolerable 
imposts, luxuries and employments in which they might not 
participate. 

The deputies, who were elected in the midst of these tu- 
mults, had scarcely met before Francis died, and they gener- 
ally adopted the opinion that their legal existence had ended 
with his natural life. The sages of the law decided otherwise. 
They maintained that, numerous as were the instances of the 
mortality of the kings of France, the King of France was 
immortal; and that, therefore, the assembly, w^ich Francis 
had summoned might, without any new elections, be holden 
by his successor, Charles IX. ; and thus it happened that the 
ceremonial of opening the session was performed by the new 
king, then a boy in his eleventh year. The more arduous 
duty of explaining why this venerable institution of their an- 
cestors was once more called into activity, devolved on the 
Chancellor I'Hopital. ^ 

He reviewed the origin, the labors, and the privileges of the 



330 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

States-Greneral from tlie earliest times. He disclosed and la- 
mented the oppressive wants of tlie treasury. He depicted 
the calamities which either menaced or were actually afflict- 
ing the kingdom. He ascribed them to differences of religious 
opinions, for which (as he maintained) a General Council was 
the only remedy ; and he earnestly recommended a reciprocal 
toleration until such a synod should have met and spoken. 
" G-entleness," he said, "will make many more converts than 
violence. Pray for the heretics. Do your utmost to reclaim 
them, and you will render to the Church a far better service 
than by hating and reviling her antagonists." 

To these wise and Christian counsels the Clergy answered 
by quoting against the Huguenots the divine commands to 
exterminate the guilty Canaanites. The Nobles and the Tiers 
Etat, on the contrary, joined with the chancellor in his appeal 
to the next Grcneral Council, and echoed his advice that, until 
the religious controversies should have been set at rest by that 
ultimate authority, no weapon but that of kind persuasion 
should be employed against the innovators. Respecting the 
secular interests of the nation, the thi-ee orders were, to a great 
extent, unanimous. 

Here, then, was a concurrence of whatever could promise a 
successful result to the dehberations of the States-Greneral. 
Holding the balance between the royal and the aristocratic 
powers, and regarded both by the Catholics and by the Hu- 
guenots as at least the immediate umpires in their disputes, 
what was the obstacle to the assertion, by the representatives 
of France, of all the powers necessary the vindicating the lib- 
erties and redressing the grievances of the French people? 
The obstacle was found in their want, not of strength, but 
of wisdom. They squandered the invaluable opportunity of 
which they were masters by two capital errors. The first was, 
that they demanded every thing ; the second, that they con- 
ceded nothing. 

After passing laborious weeks in the preparation of their 
cahiers, the States presented them, at last, in a form the best 
calculated to alarm each of the three great powers, whom it 
most behooved them to conciliate — the queen-mother, the 
house of Lorraine, and the Middle, or Constitutional party in 
the government. In those cahiers were recapitulated all the 



'^ THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 331 

evils under which society was laboring, and all the remedies 
by which they might be either removed or mitigated. Every 
existing form of misgovernment was thus, at once, brought 
into view, and depicted on the same dark canvas ; and reforms 
so numerous and important were simultaneously suggested, 
as to give to the project the menacing appearance of a total 
revolution. Such a scheme at once excited the jealousy of 
the royal and aristocratic powers, and depressed the hopes of 
L'Hopital and thB other enlightened advisers of the crown. In 
the presence of such a pyramid of alleged abuses, and of such 
a mass of proposed measures of relief, the zeal of the most 
ardent reformers was paralyzed, while to the opponents of all 
change it afforded at least a plausible apology for inaction. 

At once to pursue and to postpone theoretical perfection — 
to reconcile the loftiest hopes for the future with the humblest 
labors for the present, and so to work out the practicable while 
meditating the ideal — is a wisdom of which ancient France 
has left no traditions, and of which (perhaps for that reason) 
modern France has had no experience. 

But the States-Greneral of Orleans erred as much in refusing 
all reasonable concessions as in keeping out of sight no imag- 
inable demand. The wants of the treasury were urgent and 
extreme, and a necessitous court and nobility would not have 
been unwilling to repay a liberal supply of money by enlarg- 
ing the franchises of the French people, and by redressing some 
of the complaints of their representatives. But that price the 
authors of the cahiers were unwilling either frankly to offer or 
distinctly to refuse. They evaded it by an excuse alike un- 
founded and imprudent. They affected to regard themselves 
as invested by their constituents, not with a general authority 
to judge and act for them, but only with a limited power to 
judge and act in the particular affairs expressly mentioned in 
their instructions ; and finding in those instructions no direct 
authority to impose any new tax, they declared themselves 
incompetent to make the grants which the crown had required. 

In this suicidal repudiation of one of their own highest priv- 
ileges, the court acquiesced promptly and with apparent pleas- 
ure. To Catharine and her counselors it was no unwelcome 
tidings that the States- G-eneral of France, so long disused and 
so much dreaded, had disavowed any higher character than 



332 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 

that of delegates or mandatories, invested only with the right 
of carrying into effect the expre3s orders of their constituents. 
But this abandonment of their higher and more independent 
functions was unrewarded hy the anticipated escape from the 
pecuniary demands of the Q,ueen Regent. The deputies were 
sent hack to their constituents to ohtain from them the requi- 
site authority for raising new imposts, with no one grievance 
redressed, hut with gracioi^-S promises of the benefits which 
the king would confer if the necessary supplies should be first 
granted to him. 

New v/rits were accordingly issued for the election of depu- 
ties, to meet in another assembly of the States- G-eneral. But 
much of the terror once inspired by such bodies had now pass- 
ed away ; and the court was encouraged, by the experience 
gained at Orleans, to depart widely, on this occasion, from the 
ancient laws and usages of the realm. For, first, the whole 
number of the deputies of the three orders was reduced from 
393 to 39 ; and, secondly, they were declared to be eligible, 
not by the various bailliages, but by the twelve greater gov- 
ernments of the 'kingdom ; and, thirdly, the electoral bodies 
were expressly forbidden to instruct then* deputies, or even 
themselves to deliberate on any subject, excepting only that 
of the aids and subventions to be given to the king. In ear- 
lier times such an infringement of the constitution of the 
States would have been indignantly resisted. But the court 
had rightly inferred from then* recent proceedings that such as- 
semblies were no longer really formidable. There remains no 
record of so much as a single remonstrance or murmur against 
these enormous innovations. 

Resolved, as it would seem, to ascertain whether there was 
any lunit to their submissive spirit, the court separated the 
three orders from each other almost immediately after their 
meeting at St. Grermain's, in August, 1561. The clergy were 
removed to Poissy, to join the conference at that place between 
the Catholic and Protestant divines ; the Nobles and the Tiers 
Etat being sent to conduct the business of the session at Pon- 
toise. When thus divided, the three orders were easily sub- 
dued. The Clergy were terrified by threats into what was 
called a voluntary gift of fifteen millions of livres. The No- 
bles and the Tiers Etat were allured, by vague promises of re- 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 333 

form, to impose heavy duties on liquors imported into any for- 
tified cities. 

The triumph of the queen-mother and of the house of Lor- 
raine over the representative body was thus complete. But in 
the Chancellor I'Hopital France at that time possessed a states- 
man m whose wisdom, equity, and moderation some counter- 
poise was found against the cruel and selfish ambition of Cath- 
arine, and of the Duke and Cardinal of G-uise. By L'Hopital's 
advice, the States of Pontoise were not used merely as instru- 
ments for extractmg money from the people, but, in return for 
their grants, they were permitted to reap some important ad- 
vantages. They were admitted to a direct participation in 
three great measures of state policy : the ratification of the 
treaty by which the queen-mother and the King of Navarre 
had divided between them the powers of the regency ; the de- 
vising measures for the reconcilement of the Catholics and 
Calvinists ; and the preparation of a scheme for the discharge 
of the debts of the crown. To L'Hopital, also, the States- 
General were indebted for the promulgation, in the name of 
Charles IX., of what was called the Edict of Orleans — a law 
designed to give effect to some of the reforms demanded by 
them during their session in that city. That edict fell, indeed, 
very far short of their interminable project, and was, therefore, 
vehemently opposed by most of the members of their body. 
It also greatly abridged the privileges of the Parliament of 
Paris, and was, therefore, opposed by that company with equal 
vehemence. But it was precisely in this conflict between the 
two that the chancellor found the means of accomplishing his 
own purposes. The States sought his support against the Par- 
liament, and the Parliament against the States ; and his pro- 
jected law was at length accepted as a compromise by both. 
It long continued in force, bearing his name, and destined, as 
it seemed, to remain an imperishable monument to his honor. 
But it fell at last in the universal wreck of air the ancient in- 
stitutions of France. It is, however, still a monument to be 
studied, in all its details, by any one who would rightly ap- 
preciate the true spirit of that once venerated monarchy. For 
the present it may be enough to say that it established the 
Pragmatic Sanction so far as it related to the right of the king 
to appoint the bishops of France ; that it forbade the abuse of 



334 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

Papal monitories ; that it regulated the law of the licensed 
publication of books ; that it confined judicial offices to men of 
the gown, to the exclusion of men of the sword ; that it abol- 
ished the seignorial courts of justice ; and that it abridged the 
power of an ancestor to disinherit his heir. If, to us, these 
enactments, and such as these, should appear to be but scanty 
fruits of the labors and the sacrifices of two successive national 
assemblies, we should bear in mind that the innovations thus 
established were in themselves of no light importance, and that 
the mode of effecting them was in the highest degree moment- 
ous. It was the first law which had been enacted by any king 
of France since the reign of John, with the express and avow- 
ed purpose of giving effect to the desires of the States- G-eneral. 
The Ordinance of Orleans, imperfectly as it may have accom- 
plished that object, was, therefore, not unjustly hailed as the 
recognition of a great principle, and as the prolific germ of 
other concessions to be made, in future times, to the represent- 
atives of the French people. 

That hope was not, however, to be accomplished. In the 
dark annals of France, few periods are involved in a deeper 
gloom than the fifteen years which intervened between the 
dissolution of the States of Pontoise and the first of the two 
meetings of the States at Blois. They had been years of civil 
war embittered by religious animosities. The Protestants had 
won battles, had suffered defeats, had endured persecutions, 
had crowded the scaffold as martyrs, and had undergone the 
butcheries of St. Bartholomew. Five successive edicts of pa- 
cification had, each in turn, introduced a short, hollow, and un- 
quiet truce. But between the hostile parties there was no 
longer any place for confidence or for pardon. By each of them 
had been organized a confederation full of menace to the other ; 
and of danger, both to the authority of the crown and to the 
peace of the kingdom. Between the Huguenots and the Po- 
litical Catholics had been concluded a treaty for establishing 
within the state, but apart from it, a species of republic, gov- 
erned by laws peculiar to itself in whatever related to public 
worship, to justice, to war, to commerce, and to finance. The 
more zealous Catholics, under the guidance of the house of 
Gruise, had laid the foundation of the great Catholic league, 
with the scarcely disguised purpose of subverting the liberties 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. ooO 

of the Gallican Church, and of exckiding from the throne the 
descendants of Hugues Capet, in favor of the prmces and fam- 
ily of Lorraine, the supposed posterity of Charlemagne. The 
feeble court, meanwhile dreading and distrusted by either par- 
ty, at one time attempted to govern both by holding the bal- 
ance between them, and at another time were seriously en- 
gaged in devising with an adventurer, Poncet by name, who 
had studied the science of government in Turkey, a scheme for 
establishing in France the naked despotism of the Sublime 
Porte. Nor was there wanting the interference of that formi- 
dable potentate, the press, which, in the form of pamphlets and 
of journals, was propagating some of those maxims which we 
now revere as the corner-stones of all constitutional politics, 
but which were, in that age, denounced as incitements to an- 
archy and sedition. 

In this labyrinth of mtrigues and conflict of passions, there 
was one ground alone in which the antagonist ranks were not 
at variance. They all agreed in demanding an assembly of 
the States-'Greneral. It promised to the Catholic Leaguers a 
sanction, or at least an apology, for their treasonable compact. 
It promised to the Protestant and Political confederacy the re- 
forms, civil and religious, for which they were associated. It 
promised to Catharine and her son Henry a solution of the per- 
ilous problem, to which of those hostile forces it would be the 
more safe and expedient for them to adliere ; and to the liter- 
ary dictators of the age it promised a broad channel and an ef- 
fective agency through which their doctrines might be the most 
readily diffused and the most widely disseminated. 

The States were accordingly summoned to meet ; and on the 
6th of December, 1576, 326 deputies appeared at Blois in obe- 
dience to that citation. In the flower of his youth, and in all 
the pomp of royalty, Henry III. presided over them. To those 
historians who, penetrating the inmost hearts of the men of 
former times, resolve all the enigmas of them more confidently 
than most of us are able to decipher the secrets of our own, it 
belongs to explain what were the dominant passions which 
united, and held together in the same bosom, those apparently 
irreconcilable propensities by which the last of the house of 
Valois seems to have been governed. His youth of noble dar- 
ing was followed by an imbecile and voluptuous manhood. 



338 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

The ability both to express and to win all the kindly affections 
was combined in him with an habitual and inanimate selfish- 
ness. His devotion in all religious observances was fervent, 
even to extravagance ; yet was he destitute of any perceptible 
respect for the restraints or for the duties which religion en- 
joins. Though faithful to his worthless associates and ill- 
chosen friends, even at hazards which might have datanted the 
bravest, he was faithless to his subjects when both honor and 
prudence exhorted him to fidelity. Grifted with energy and 
with talents of no common order, he was yet the constant sport 
of outward circumstances, and the passive instrument of minds 
holding a far lower place than his own in the scale of intellect. 
He died the victim of principles falsely imputed to him, and 
became the martyr of the very cause which, from the com- 
mencement to the close of his life, he had relentlessly perse- 
cuted.. Who but he whose inalienable prerogative it is to be 
the Searcher of hearts may discover the true reconcilement of 
these contradictions ? And yet what diligent observer has not 
remarked in others — what honest self-observer has not occa- 
sionally detected in himself — some inconsistencies not wholly 
dissimilar from those of Henry ? For who has not had occa- 
sion to trace the progressive victory of what is sensitive, sens- 
uous, and sensual, over what is moral, intellectual, and spir- 
itual in the nature of every man who, having, like Henry, been 
subjected to the fiery trial of what we miscall prosperity, has 
been exempted, by the too easy condition of his life, from the 
strenuous competition, the laborious self-denial, the invigorat- 
ing rebukes, and disappointments, and sufferings, which pre- 
pare the less-favored children of fortune to scale the obstinate 
heights of honest fame and enduring usefuhiess ? 

To such an elevation, indeed, Henry occasionally made some 
approach, and especially when he appeared as a public speak- 
er ; for his presence was noble, his voice clear and liquid, and 
his elocution destitute neither of dignity nor of pathos. Take, 
as an example, the following passage from his address to the 
States- G-eneral of Blois on the opening of their sessions. ''In 
all the events of these later wars, nothing," he said, "has giv- 
en me so much sorrow, or affected me so deeply, as the oppres- 
sion and the distress under which my poor people have labored. 
Often has my commiseration for them moved me to implore 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 



337 



God to deliver them from their calamities ; or, if not, then that 
he would be pleased in this, the flower of my age, to terminate 
at once my reign and my life, with a reputation befitting the 
descendant of so long a line of magnanimous princes, rather 
than allow me to grow old, protracting, in the midst of irre- 
mediable troubles, a reign to be remembered in future gener- 
ations only as a reign of public misfortunes." 

Kind and kingly words ! but not the only words uttered by 
Henry on this occasion. He had met the States-G-eneral with 
the earnest hope that they would sanction the war which he 
desired to wage against his Protestant subjects ; for he hated, 
with all the energy of which his enervated mind was still ca- 
pable, the Reformers over whom he had triumphed in his youth 
at Jarnac and at Montcontour. But, without the concurrence 
of the representatives of the French people, he could not ven- 
ture to raise his standard in such a war ; and his aspirations 
for their support in this enterprise were privately expressed in 
the form of a parody on the ancient philanthropic wish that 
the Romans had but one neck among them, that so they might 
all be decapitated at a blow. "Would," exclaimed Henry, 
"that the deputies of the Three Estates (I must substitute 
a periphrastic for a literal version) were joined together bodily 
in such sort that a single kick might drive them all at once to 
vote for the establishment of uniformity of religion in France." 
The king thus spoke in his cabinet from the heart. On his 
throne he had spoken from his lips. But they to whom he had 
spoken needed no royal voice to stimulate their antipathy to 
the Calvinists and their leaders. The States-G-eneral prompt- 
ly gratified the wishes of their sovereign, though without any 
such unseemly external impulse as he had meditated. Among 
their earliest resolutions was a vote that Henry should be moved 
to reunite all Frenchmen in the same faith and worship. 

Thus far they were unanimous. But with regard to the 
use, either of the stake or of the sword, for the propagation 
of the faith, the deputies differed. The majority of the mem- 
bers of the Tiers Etat, when told by the head, proposed to add 
to the address to the king a protest against the adoption of 
such methods. The majority of the twelve governments or 
committees into which the Tiers Etat were divided, voted, on 
the other hand, against any such qualification of the address. 

Y 



338 THE STATES-GENERAL 'of 

It was, therefore, presented to Henry in a form which was un- 
derstood by him and hy the whole assembly as a declaration 
of war against the Huguenots. 

The immediate result of this vote was probably unforeseen 
by any of the authors or the promoters of it. Henry had 
found remaining energy enough to imprecate the destruction 
of the heretics of his kingdom ; but, on receiving this formal 
summons to draw the sword against them, his resolution fal- 
tered. He saw in it merely an opportune and welcome deliv- 
erance from the responsibility of so momentous a decision, and 
rejoiced in the opportunity of casting on the States- Greneral 
themselves the reproach of reviving hostilities, and on the Re- 
formers the odium of refusing peace. To purchase this relief 
from, his duties as a king, he was content to sacrifice the high- 
est prerogative of his crown. He was willing that the depu- 
ties should assume the office of negotiators with those whom 
he and they concurred in denouncing as public enemies, and 
he answered their address by expressly inviting them to en- 
gage in the proposed treaty with the Huguenots. The invita- 
tion was promptly and gladly accepted. Envoys proceeded 
from the States-Greneral to Henry of Navarre, to Conde, and 
to the other Protestant leaders with proposals of reconciliation. 
But these proposals had been studiously conceived in such a 
spirit, and framed in such terms, as to provoke and to insure 
the indignant defiance with which they were received. Thus 
the States- G-eneral, having been permitted to assume one of 
the functions of the royal government, had used it in such a 
.manner as to involve the king and the people of France in a 
renewal of the civil war. 

But in the mind of Henry III. unkingly passions counter- 
poised each other. When thus invited to satiate his hatred 
of his Protestant antagonists, he became paralyzed by his 
dread of his Catholic allies. He abhorred the Huguenots as 
the open enemies of the Church to which he was supersti- 
tiously devoted. He dreaded the Leaguers as the secret ene- 
mies of his own royal authority, to which his devotion was not 
less absolute. Oscillating between these emotions, he rushed 
into the precise dangers which he desired to escape, and 
brought himself into subjection to the very heretics whom he 
thirsted to destroy. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 339 

The objects of the Catholic League were the deposition of 
Henry, the surrender of the liberties of the G-allican Church, 
and the extermination or the exile of the Calvinists. Yet 
Henry now announced himself to the States-Greneral of Blois 
as the head of that traitorous association. He idly hoped. to 
foil the Duke of G-uise by thus wresting from his grasp the 
keenest of the weapons with which that ambitious prince was 
assailing his crown and dynasty. With his own hand he sub- 
scribed the written act of their traitorous confederacy. He re- 
quired the deputies to subjoin their signatures to his, and dis- 
patched iseveral of them to solicit in his name the subscriptions 
of the governors, nobles, and seigneurs in every province of 
his realm. Descending from his station as King of France to 
that of a titular leader of a fanatical faction, he rendered him- 
self the slave of the audacious agitator whom he had hoped to 
supersede, and whetted the daggers which were, ere long, to 
be plunged into the bosom of G-uise and into his own. 

Thus the hopes with which the Leaguers had anticipated the 
assembly at Blois were at least partially gratified. The court, 
also, had obtained their expected deliverance from the torment 
of irresolution, and were committed to a war with the Hu- 
guenots to the knife. It remains to inquire how far the hopes 
of the party called Political were accomplished. 

They had proposed to themselves various reformations in the 
government, and had resolved to stipulate for new or enlarged 
popular franchises, in return for what pecuniary aids might 
be granted to the sovereign ; but, again, this projected inter- 
change of benefits was defeated by the inexorable parsimony 
of the States-G-eneral. The king demanded of them funds to 
sustain the Avar into which they had plunged him. But his 
demands were disregarded. The Nobles proffered their swords, 
but nothing more. The Clergy refused any grants until the 
royal encroachments on their spnitual power should have been 
withdrawn. The Tiers Btat insisted that the kins would 
find an ample revenue in the practice of a wise economy. 
Long, vehement, and futile were the debates which follow- 
ed, until the deputies, believing that Henry was tamed by 
fatigue and poverty to submission, proposed at last to assist 
him with the necessary funds, but only on the extreme con- 
dition that he should impart the force and authority of law to 



340 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

every resolution which all the Three Estates should unani- 
mously adopt. 

The offer was indignantly rejected. To Henry, and prob- 
ably to the States themselves, it appeared nothing less than 
an abdication of his royal office. Yet to avoid, if possible, a 
total failure of the supplies indispensable to the impending 
war, he proposed that no measures which the States-G-eneral 
should recommend for his adoption should be rejected, except 
on the advice of a commission to be composed of an equal 
number of his own privy counselors and of deputies to be 
selected for that purpose by the States themselves. 

To this compromise the Clergy and the Nobles would have 
acceded ; but it was firmly resisted by the Tiers Etat. They 
maintained that they had no right to delegate to others their 
own delegated powers ; that they had no right to reduce the 
States-G-eneral from a large popular assembly to a private and 
innumerous chamber ; that they had no right to admit the 
officers of the crown into such a participation of the privileges 
of the representatives of the people ; and that, in the proposed 
commission, there would be neither liberty of speech, nor any 
real exemption from the corrupting influences of the court. 

Thus the offers of the States having been rejected by the 
king, and the offers of the king having been rejected by the 
States, the negotiations reached their close. The deputies 
quitted the king with sullen and menacing remonstrances » 
The king quitted the deputies declaring indignantly that he 
would not engage in a war, for the expenses of which they 
had refused to provide, but would conclude peace with the 
Huguenots on the best terms which his pecuniary necessities 
would permit him to obtain. 

None of the hopes of the political reformers were, therefore, 
fulfilled by the States of Blois. That assembly had repeated 
the error of their predecessors at Orleans in demanding every 
thing and in conceding nothing. Yet their labors were not 
altogether fruitless. Two years after the close of their session, 
Henry promulgated a law, which was called the Ordonnanoe 
de Blois, because it purported to give effect to the cahiers of 
the States-G-eneral holden in that city. It is a curious monu- 
ment of the learning of the lawyers, and of the inefficacy of 
the laws of that age. It is pronounced by the most competent 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 841 

judges to be an admirable exercise in wliat may be called the 
art of didactic jurisprudence ; a vast accumulation of rules in- 
dicating wliat ought to be done on many subjects of the high- 
est social interest, but of rules destitute of those executory 
principles, without which every enactment must be useless 
and unprofitable. 

From the dissolution of the States-Greneral of Blois, the 
downward course of the life of Henry was tracked by crime, 
by disaster, and by shame. The hostilities with the Hugue- 
nots, which he had invoked with such wanton levity, and dis- 
avowed with such petulant impatience, became inevitable ; 
and, for the seventh time, war was proclaimed against an en- 
emy whom he was powerless alike to conciliate or to conquer. 
After a brief campaign, they extorted from his w^eakness or 
his fears the pacification of Fleix. But any peace with the 
Reformers involved, of course, the toleration of their opinions 
and their worship ; and, in the judgment of the Leaguers, the 
toleration of such heretics was an offense not less unpardona- 
ble than heresy itself. Nor did they affect to pardon it. No 
indignity, however contumelious — no calumnies, however 
hateful, were wanting to their revenge. The pulpits and the 
presses of Catholic France rang with fierce and unmeasured 
invectives against the recreant king. The Pope declared him- 
self the protector of the League. The Leaguers entered into 
a treaty with Philip II. of Spain for excluding the heretical 
branches of the house of Bourbon from the succession to the 
throne of France. The Cardinal of Bourbon, claiming, in vir- 
tue of that treaty, the rank of heir presumptive to the French 
monarchy, nominated the Dukes of G-uise and of Lorraine to 
be joint lieutenant generals of the kingdom ; and those princes, 
in virtue of that nomination, levied troops, embodied an army, 
and took possession of several of the royal fortresses. 

While his throne was thus menaced from within and from 
without by the rising tempest of treason and revolt, what 
were the pursuits of the King of France ? With a basket full 
of curious spaniels hanging from his neck, he busied himself 
with the frolics of the monkeys and the clatter of the parro- 
quets which filled his menagerie, or took refuge from ennui in 
marriage fetes, in ecclesiastical processions, or even in funeral 
ceremonies, and squandered on these effeminate pastimes sums 



342 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

which, otherwise employed, might have placed him at the 
head of a force sufficient to overwhelm his enemies. Those 
enemies at once despised and enjoyed his degradation. They 
seized on the government of Paris. They organized a revolu- 
tionary committee for each of the sixteen sections of the city, 
and they summoned the Duke of G-uise to the command of 
the insurgent forces of the capital. He assumed it, and ex- 
torted from the feeble Henry the treaty of Nemours. It con- 
stituted the duke general in chief of the royal forces and gov- 
ernor of twelve fortified towns. It granted him the sum of 
700,000 crowns as an indemnity for his past expenses in the 
royal service. It pledged the king to revoke all his conces- 
sions to the Huguenots, and it hound him (destitute as he was 
hoth of men and money) to renew the war against them. 

Por the eighth time, therefore, that war was proclaimed by 
Henry. It plunged him into irretrievable losses, defeat, and 
shame, while it conducted Henry of Navarre to at least one 
signal triumph, and Gruise himself to new successes and to 
increased popularity. 

The storm now raged against the unfortunate king with re- 
kindled and yet greater fury. The Sorbonne declared that 
his deposition would be in accordance with the divine laws. 
The Duke of G-uise, marching into Paris and entering the 
Louvre, insulted and bearded him to his face. The citizens 
established an insurrectionary government, gained possession 
of Yincennes and the Bastile, threw up barricades, defeated 
and disarmed the Swiss who guarded the person of their sov- 
ereign, and compelled him to escape to Chartres, a despised 
and solitary fugitive. To Chartres he was follovfed by the 
now triumphant G-uise, who dictated there, to the degraded 
king, what was thenceforward called the Treaty of Union of 
July, 1588. It forgave, or rather it applauded, all the out- 
rages of Paris. It declared all heretics incapable of any pub- 
lic trust, office, or employment. It excluded the heretical 
members of the house of Bourbon from the line of succession 
to the crown. It raised the duke to the office of lieutenant 
general of the kingdom ; and it provided for the immediate 
convention of the States- G-eneral of France. To the observ- 
ance of these terms Henry pledged himself in the most solemn 
forms of adjuration. 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 343 

Again, therefore, the States-Greneral were summoned to 
meet at the city of Blois ; and on the 16th of Octoher, 1588, 
505 deputies were assembled to listen to the inaugural oration 
of the king. " Among them," says the contemporary histori- 
an Matthieu, "was conspicuous Henry, duke of G-uise, who, 
as great master of the royal household, sat near the throne, 
dressed in white satin, with his hood thrown carelessly hack- 
ward ; and from that elevated position he cast his eyes along 
the dense crowd before him, that he might recognize and dis- 
tinguish his followers, and encourage with a glance their reli- 
ance on his fortune and success ; and thus, without uttering 
a word, might seem to say to each of them, ' I see you ;' and 
then (proceeds Matthieu) the duke, rising, with a profound 
obeisance to the assembly, and followed by the long train of 
his officers and gentlemen, retired to meet and to introduce the 
king." The lofty consciousness of his royal character still im- 
parted some dignity to Henry's demeanor. Addressing the 
States with a majestic and touching eloquence, he asserted 
his title to the gratitude of his people, claimed the unimpair- 
ed inheritance of the prerogatives of his ancestors, pronounced 
the pardon of those who had already entered into traitorous 
conspiracies against him, and threatened condign punishment 
of all who might in future engage in any similar attempts. 
Even G-uise listened, with evident discomposure, to this un- 
expected rebuke and public menace from the lips of his sov- 
ereign. It was, however, the single gleam of success with 
which Henry was cheered in his intercourse with the repre- 
sentatives of his people ; and the rest of the history of the 
States- G-eneral of 1588 is little else than a record of the hu- 
miliations to which they subjected him. 

He spoke, as we have seen, with royal indignation of the 
outrages of Paris and of Chartres ; but he was compelled to 
omit all those passages of his address in his subsequent publi- 
cation of it. He pubhcly claimed for himself the cognizance 
of all questions respecting the verification of the powers of the 
deputies ; but he was constrained, with equal publicity, to re- 
tract that pretension. He entertained an appeal from one of 
the members of the Tiers Etat against a decision of his order ; 
but he was sternly reminded that the States had met at Blois, 
not as supplicants to obey, but as counselors to advise him. 



344 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

He pardoned the Dukes of Soissons and Conti their having 
home arms under the Huguenot standards, that so they might 
be qualified to take then places among the order of the Nobles ; 
but the validity of his pardon was contemptuously denied. 
He resisted, as an insult, the demand of the States that he 
should repeat, in their presence, the oath he had already taken 
to observe the Treaty of the Union ; but he was taught that 
submission was inevitable. He demanded that the States 
should, in their turn, swear fidelity to himself, and to the 
fundamental laws of the realm ; but he was obliged to with- 
draw that demand. He insisted that the exclusion of Henry 
of Beam from the succession to the throne should be preceded 
by an invitation to that prince to return into the bosom of the 
Church ; but his proposal was inflexibly and scornfully resist- , 
ed. He commissioned two of his officers to lay before the or- 
der of the Clergy his objections to the acceptance of the decrees 
of the Council of Trent ; but his officers were driven away with 
insult. He solicited pecuniary aid for carrying on the war 
against the Huguenots ; but the suit was answered by a de- 
mand for his surrender of a large part of hi.s actual revenue. 

This long series of indignities was readily traced by Henry 
to the guidance of a single hand. G-uise was but too success- 
fully exerting his influence at Blois to dethrone the king by 
degrading him. The crown, which must inevitably fall from 
the grasp of a prince whom all men had been taught to despise, 
might readily be transferred to the brows of a prince to whom 
all were looking with admiration. 

Yet it was a hazardous policy. The king who had con- 
quered at Jarnac and Montcontour, and who had concurred in 
devising the massacre of St. Bartholomew, was not a man to 
be restrained by the voice either of fear, of humanity, or of 
conscience. The friends of G-uise saw, and pointed out to him 
the danger of provoking the dormant passions of the enervated 
Henry ; but he received their remonstrances with contempt, 
and habitually and ostentatiously placed himself within the 
powers of the sovereign whom he at once despised, exaspemted, 
and defied. 

It was at the hour of eight in the morning of the 23d of 
December, 1588, that G-uise was summoned from the council 
room at Blois to attend Henry in his private chamber. He 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 345 

entered it alone and unguarded, and had scarcely crossed the 
threshold before he fell beneath the daggers of assassins who 
had been stationed there for his destruction. His brother, the 
Cardinal of Gruise, immediately followed, and fell by the same 
hands. The Cardinal of Bourbon, and all the other partisans 
of the house of Gruise, were arrested. An officer of the royal 
household, commanding an armed force, then entered the 
chamber of the Tiers Etat, and seized as state prisoners the 
president and three others of the most conspicuous of the 
Leaguers comprised m that body ; and when the work of blood 
and treachery had been thus consummated, the palace gates 
were thrown open, and Henry, presenting himself to his dis- 
mayed but indignant subjects, exclaimed, " At length I am a 
king." 

But " he that soweth iniquity," says the wise man, " shall 
reap vanity, and the rod of his anger shall fail." 

Within a few days of the slaughter of the Duke and Cardi- 
nal of G-uise, Catharine, the mother of Henry, and, perhaps, 
the only human being who really loved him, was summoned 
from the world, where, except himself, there, probably remained 
not one who did not execrate her memory. In a few weeks, 
Paris, and the greater part of France, had solemnly renounced 
all allegiance to him. In less than eight months, the League 
had avenged the assassination of their chiefs by the knife of 
the fanatic Jacques Clement. But in the midst of this gen- 
eral indignation, the States-Greneral, and they alone, were, in 
appearance at least, unmoved. Occasionally, indeed, and even 
earnestly, they solicited the release of the prisoners. But they 
breathed not so much as a single remonstrance to the king 
against his enormous infringement of their saCred character 
and privileges in the persons of their colleagues. "With an al- 
most incredible abjectness, they addressed themselves at once 
to the ordinary business of the session, and discussed with 
Henry amendments in the law of treason, schemes for the 
admission of his officers to join in their deliberations, and plans 
for bringing to account all public defaulters. They presented 
to him, not indignant defiances, but humble descriptions of the 
sufferings of his people, and meek supplications for the redress 
of them ; and continued, during a whole month after the death 
of the Princes of Lorraine, to prostrate themselves before the 



346 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 

king, as in the presence, not of an assassin, but of a conqueror. 
The session then closed with the royal audience customary on 
such occasions ; when, in the hope of propitiating his favor to 
the imprisoned deputies, they addressed him in a speech in 
which his royal vktues, and especially his clemency, were lav- 
ishly extolled. On the 16th of January, 1589, they at last 
took their leave of their sovereign and of each other ; when 
" we parted," says their great orator and memorialist, Bernard, 
" with tears in our eyes, bewailing what had passed, and look- 
ing forward with terror to what was yet to come ; and observ- 
ing that, in our separation, France had an evil augury that she 
herself was about to be torn in pieces." 

The augury was but too well verified. The States- G-eneral 
of France never again assembled till they met ineffectually in 
the reign of Louis XIII., to be then finally adjourned till the 
eve of the French Revolution. 

"When our own Charles I. (whom the utmost malignity of 
faction never degraded by a comparison with Henry III.) at- 
tempted to arrest, in the House of Commons, the leaders of his 
revolutionary opponents, there were yet living among his court- 
iers many who remembered the seizure of the deputies at 
Blois as one of the tragical occurrences of their youth. Some 
of them may, perhaps, have drawn from the passive acquies- 
cence of the Tiers Etat in that outrage an argument in favor 
of that disastrous imitation of the policy of the French king. 
The remembrance of the fatal apathy of the States-Gfeneral 
may, perhaps, also have suggested to our ancestors in the House 
of Commons, as it may now explain and vindicate to ourselves, 
that stern resentment, which no subsequent concessions could 
either appease or mitigate. Happy would it have been for the 
Commons of France, in a far later age, if they also had dili- 
gently meditated this passage in their national annals. The 
history of the States-Greneral of Blois, well pondered, and right- 
ly understood by the French people, might have averted the 
monstrous progeny of revolution, of wretchedness, and of crime, 
which, exactly two hundred years afterward, sprang from the 
too prolifio Avomb of the States-G-eneral of 1789. 

From age to age, assemblies of the representatives of the 
people of that kingdom had but repeated the exhibition of the 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 347 

same imposing but delusive spectacle. Arrayed in all the 
theatrical pomp of an ancient monarchy — embellished with the 
noblest names and the most illustrious titles — connected, by no 
doubtful traditions, with the national comitia of Clovis, of 
Charlemagne, and of St. Louis — elected by a substantially free 
and an almost universal suffrage, what was wanting to enable 
the States- Greneral to establish a constitutional government? 
And yet, what did they really accomplish for the freedom of 
then nation, during the long centuries in which they had so 
often been summoned to meet and to advise their sovereigns ? 

It is to be acknowledged in their favor that they constantly 
and faithfully laid bare the diseases of the realm, and depicted 
in the most vivid colors the wrongs of their constituents ; that 
they pronounced orations of surpassing eloquence ; that they 
gave birth to many brilliant aphorisms ; that they recognized 
the most profound principles ; and that they formed and an- 
nounced the loftiest designs. Nor is that all. They have the 
farther merit of having occasionally made some constitutional 
franchises, and of having lent their authority to codes of laws 
which have immortalized the compilers of them. Their con- 
demnation is, that they left all these diseases unhealed ; that 
their eloquence proved to be at last but so many sonorous dec- 
lamations ; that their aphorisms, their principles, and their 
projects were gradually relegated from the senate to the schools ; 
that the laws enacted at their instance remained dormant and 
ineffectual ; and that the abuses which they condemned sprang 
up, after each renewed censure of them, with even greater vig- 
or than before, like so many noxious plants, pruned, but not 
eradicated. 

And whence this continually recurring frustration of so 
much public spirit, though animated by so much ability, and 
exerted, as it was, with such assiduous diligence ? That pub- 
lic spirit was profitless because the three orders of the States 
met there, not as allies, but as antagonists ; because the im- 
passable barriers of privilege, and rank, and prejudice prevented 
their fusion into one harmonious body, the different members 
of which could co-operate together for the general good ; be- 
cause, on the contrary, the king always found in one or other 
of those members a counterpoise against the authority of the 
rest ; because they contentedly acquiesced in the humble of- 



348 THE STATES-GENERAL, ETC. 

fioe of suggesting and imploring remedies, and left to the king 
the higher function of enacting, and, therefore, the means of 
defeating them ; because the embarrassing multitude and the 
rhetorical vagueness of their proposals afforded always a pre- 
text, often a justification, for the royal disregard of the greater 
number of their complaints ; because the possession of a usurp- 
ed, but undisputed legislative power enabled the king to avoid 
the meetings of the States-G-eneral, except at some great, in- 
frequent, and distant intervals ; and because, during the many 
intervening years in which the representatives of the people 
exercised no superintendence or control over the executive and 
legislative government, the French monarchs committed, and 
the French people expiated, those habitual and grievous faults, 
from which, in the exercise of unrestrained authority, man nev- 
er has been exempt, and never will be exempted, unless, in- 
deed, the nature of man himself shall hereafter be delivered 
from the corruptions and the infirmities to wliich it has hith- 
erto been in bondage. 

Are we then to conclude that the States- General were an 
unprofitable element in the constitution of the French Mon- 
archy ? Assuredly not. For, first, they moderated and re- 
strained in practice, as well as in theory, the reckless increase 
and the prodigal expenditure of the public revenue. It had 
been a maxim of the Feudal age that no impost could be law- 
fully levied on free men except with their own consent ; and 
reverence for that maxim was kept continually alive by the 
meetings of the representatives of the people, or by the tradi- 
tions of such assemblies. In process of time, indeed, the kings 
of France triumphed over this, as well as all the other con- 
stitutional principles of earlier generations, and promulgated 
edicts under which new imposts were exacted and old imposts 
were increased at the royal pleasure. But in the very pleni- 
tude of the power of Louis XIV., such edicts were condemned, 
even when they were not resisted, as a lawless usurpation. 

But the conservation of this great principle till the maturity 
of the time in which it was to revive as a fundamental law of 
the French Commonwealth is but one among the many similar 
benefits which the States-G-eneral of France conferred on the 
French people. It might not be difficult to dwell at length on 
the detail of them. But, at the present moment, such a dis- 



THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT, ETC. 349 

cnssion would be as inconvenient as, happily, it is useless ; for, 
in one of those energetic and comprehensive periods which il- 
luminate every page of M. Guizot's philosophical speculations, 
he has said, in a few words, whatever really remains to be 
said on this subject, and with those words I close my present 
lecture. 

" From one epoch to another (writes that gi-eat author), the 
States-Greneral were a living protestation against political serv- 
itude — an impassioned announcement of some gxeat tutelary 
principles. Among those principles were the exclusive right 
of the nation to impose whatever tribute the nation was to 
pay ; the right of the people to a voice in the conduct of their 
own affairs ; and the responsibility of the rulers to those over 
whom they rule. For the continued vitality of these and sim- 
ilar doctrines in France, we are chiefly indebted to the States- 
G-eneral of the kingdom ; nor is it a trifling service to any 
people thus to have cherished in their bosoms, and to have per- 
petuated in their habits, the remembrance and the love of free- 
dom." 



LECTUHB XIII. 

ON THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 

When, in June, 1787, Louis XVI. required the Parliament 
of Paris to register his edict for raising a revenue by stamps, 
that body, assisted by the dukes and peers of France, resolved 
that the right of imposing taxes on the people belonged to the 
States-G-eneral, and to them alone ; and that the Parliaments 
were not competent to sanction any fiscal ordinances. How 
then did it happen that the Power of the Purse, which the the- 
ory of the French Constitution thus ascribed to the national 
representatives, never yielded, in that kingdoin, its legitimate 
fruit of constitutional freedom ? The present and the follow- 
ing lecture will be devoted to the investigation of that prob- 
lem. I must, however, approach it by what, I fear, may seem 
a circuitous and a wearisome path. 

The revenue of the kings of France may be considered as 
having been either ordinary or extraordinary. Under the head 



350 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OP 

of ordinary revenue may be comprised all the possessions or 
proprietary rights which each monarch in his turn inherited : 
1st, as seigneur of the royal domain ; 2dly, as supreme suze- 
rain of the realm ; and, 3dly, as administrator of the central 
government. Under the head of extraordinary revenue will 
consequently he included only the produce of such imposts, 
direct or indirect, as were levied upon the people, or upon any 
class of them, under positive enactments. Proposing this as 
a methodical and convenient rather than as an exact and log- 
ical arrangement of the subject, I proceed, in pursuance of it, 
to inquire. What were the component parts of the ordinary rev- 
enue of the French kings ? and, first, what were their posses- 
sions, or proprietary rights, as seigneurs of the royal domain ? 

In the days of Hugues Capet and of his earliest successors, 
the royal domain was but a convertible term for that great fief 
(the Duchy of France) which he had inherited from his ances- 
tors ; but, by the conquest and cession of various other fiefs, 
the domain was progressively enlarged, until at last it em- 
braced by far the greater part of the kingdom of France. 
Some provinces, however (Dauphine, for example), were reu- 
nited to the crown without being annexed to the domain. 

As seigneurs of the royal domain, the French kings might, 
in the language of our own law, be said to have been seised 
of various corporeal and incorporeal hereditaments within its 
precincts ; that is, they were owners' in possession of extensive 
lands, buildings, forests, and navigable streams situate there ; 
and they were entitled to the feudal dues arising in each of 
the seigneuries within the same limits. Those dues, though 
differing in many fiefs, had a great general similitude in all. 

The nature and the amount of such dues depended on the 
rank of the vassal of whom they were claimed. If he were no- 
ble, he owed to the royal seigneur a Relief, or Droit de Qimit, 
on every change in the ownership of his fief. During his mi- 
nority, the king was entitled to the guardianship of his estate 
and person, and, therefore, to what was called the Droit de 
Garde. In some seigneuries the noble vassals also rendered 
to the king, as their feudal lord, an annual tribute on their for- 
est lands, varying from year to year with the estimated prod- 
uce of the forests. 

Every bishop and abbot, whose church was within the roy- 



THE REVENUES OF PRANCE. 851 

al domain, paid, on his appointment, a Regale ; tliat is, a 
tribute to the king, corresponding with the Relief, or Droit de 
Quint, payable on the change of ownership in a noble lay fief. 
An ignoble vassal or roturier, holding lands within the royal 
domain, owed to the king as his seigneur, 1st, a personal Cens, 
or capitation tax ; 2dly, an annual Cens, or quit-rent on his 
land ; 3dly, Loch et Ventes, that is, a fine on every change of 
ownership ; 4thly, Corvees, that is, the performance of man- 
ual labor on the public roads and works of the seigneurie dur- 
ing a certain number of days in each year ; 5thly, the obliga- 
tion of grinding his corn at the mill, and of baking his bread 
at the oven, of his royal seigneur, and not elsewhere ; 6thly, 
fees for licenses to authorize his marrying, or hunting, or fish- 
ing; 7thly, the Droit de GUe, that is, the duty of supplying 
board and lodging to the king and to his suite while on a royal 
progress ; and, 8thly, the Droit de Prise, or the duty of sup- 
plying to the king on credit, during a certain period, such ar- 
ticles of domestic consumption as might be requked for the 
royal household. 

The revenues of the king, as seigneur of the royal domain, 
differed from those of his great feudatories, not in kind, but in 
amount. His receipts were greater than any of theirs, in the 
proportion in which his fief exceeded m extent and value any 
of their fiefs. 

The preceding statements will demand material qualifica- 
tions as we descend the stream of history. Some of the most 
oppressive of the privileges of the royal seigneur had fallen into 
disuse before the accession of the house of Yalois. Some of 
them had been expressly a,bolished ; and, in some cases, those 
charges on the land which varied with its changing value had 
been commuted into fixed money payments. 

It was a general principle of law that the reigning sovereign 
had not an absolute property in the royal domain, but was 
merely entitled to the usufruct -of it, and that it was there- 
fore inalienable. jNTevertheless, in process of time, it was great- 
ly diminished by apanages to the younger members of the 
royal house ; by gratuitous donations to other persons ; by 
sales to purchasers ; and by mortgages to cr6ditors. In every 
page of the financial history of France Ave meet with the rec- 
ord of strenuous efforts to arrest this evil. The judges omit- 



352 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 

ted no opportunity of inculcating the doctrine that all gifts and 
conveyances of crown estates were invalid. The States-G-en- 
eral, when solicited by the king for money, never failed to call 
on him to resume the patrimony of his crown from those to 
whom it had been improvidently given or illegally sold. Nor 
were such resumptions infrequently made. But it was im- 
possible so to set aside conveyances of any part of the royal 
domain, when effected for valuable considerations, without en- 
tirely depreciating all future sales of any similar property. It 
became necessary, therefore, in order to restore the confidence 
of purchasers, to guarantee them by royal ordinances against 
any such breach of the public faith ; and thus, at length, the 
crown lands were sold under conditions so stringent, that nei- 
ther Sully nor Colbert were able to struggle successfully against 
the pressure of them. Such was the extent of those sales, that, 
in the reign of Louis XIV., the royal domain no longer ranked 
among the chief of the fiscal resources of the state. 

Secondly. As supreme suzerains of the realm, the kings 
of France derived various proprietary rights from that princi- 
ple of the feudal law which bound together all the successive 
titles to a fief in an unbroken chain of dependencies, descend- 
ing from the king himself, through all the intermediate seign- 
eurs, down to the lowest of their sub-feudatories. An un- 
authorized change in the tenure of any such fief might be 
prejudicial to the king, considered as the last and highest of 
the feudal lords, in the series ascending above the author of 
the innovation. He by whom any such injurious act was 
done was therefore said ahreger son fief . 

Now a fief might be so abrege by granting it to the Church 
in mortmain ; for such a grant would extinguish the fines 
which, if it had remained in lay hands, would have been pay- 
able on alienations, or on the deaths of each successive tenant. 
This was the ground, or the pretext, for a long series of ordi- 
nances regulating, restraining, or prohibiting grants in mort- 
main to ecclesiastical corporations, whether sole or aggregate. 
The effect of those laws was, at length, entirely to interdict to 
every seigneur in the realm the granting of any fief in that 
manner, except with the express license of the king as supreme 
suzerain. For such licenses the king demanded large dues, 
which collectively were called the Droit d} Amortissement. 



THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 353 

In virtue of the same principle, the king, as supreme suze- 
rain, acquired what was called the Droit de Franc Fief; that 
is, the right to exact dues on every transfer of a fief from a 
noble to an ignoble tenant. In support of this claim, it was 
maintained that, by such a transfer, a fief was abrege, because 
there was at least a legal presumption that the new owner, a 
roturier, would be less competent than the preceding owner, 
a noble, to perform the obligations on which the fief was holden. 
The real and the better reason was that to which I referred in 
a former lecture. To facilitate the sales of seignorial estates 
during the fever of the Crusades, it had been decided that, by 
acquiring a noble fief, a roturier was himself ennobled. The 
king's license for such an acquisition was consequently indis- 
pensable, since otherwise the privileges of nobility might, 
without his consent, have been conferred on any one or more 
of his subjects. For every such consent he was accustomed 
to demand a fine, varying from three years' purchase to one 
year's purchase of the fief. 

It was on the same principle that the kings of France, as 
supreme suzerains, became entitled to the Droit d'Aubain; 
that is, the right to succeed to the estate, movable or immov- 
able, of any alien dying within the realm. I had formerly 
occasion to remark that, under the first two dynasties, laws 
were not local, but personal. A stranger was, therefore, not 
entitled to the rights enjoyed by the denizens of the place to 
which he came ; and in any such place he had no means of 
effectually asserting the rights which he was supposed to bring 
with him. He therefore sought for himself and for his prop- 
erty some powerful protector. In every feudal seigneurie the 
lord claimed the privilege of affording that protection, and of 
affording it on his own terms. He therefore rescued the 
stranger from the oppression of others, but it was in order to 
render him a prey and a bondsman to himself. Against such 
wrongs the sufferer could find redress only by avowing him- 
self to be the liegeman of the king ; and the king was ever 
ready to acknowledge that relation. Gradually, and after 
many a struggle, it was thus at length established, that all 
aubains in France were royal vassals, and were not in vassal- 
age to the inferior lord within whose seigneurie they might be 
living. The financial consequence of this doctrine has already 

Z 



354 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OP 

teen noticed. Until toward the end of the eighteenth century^ 
the French kings still retained, and carried into effect, this 
absurd and inhospitable pretension. 

I do not pause to notice other minor sources of revenue, 
such as escheats and treasure-trove, to which the king was 
entitled, as what was called le souverain fieffeux. They are 
of importance only as indicating the progress which, by the 
aid of feudal doctrines, was continually made in the subjec- 
tion of the seignorial to the royal fisc. But, 

Thirdly. The kings of France had many prerogatives and 
many consequent pecuniary rights, neither as members, lior as 
the heads of the feudal hierarchy, but as administrators of the 
central government. 

Thus the Droit de joyeux Avenement was the right of each 
successive monarch, on his accession, to a tribute for confirm- 
ing in his privileges every person in possession of any special 
advantages in virtue of any royal grants. Among such per- 
sons were all bodies corporate, whether commercial or muni- 
cipal ; all naturalized aliens ; all legitimated bastards ; and all 
holders of public offices. 

The crown was also entitled to the Droit de Maitrise. 
This was a charge payable by every one who, after having 
served his apprenticeship in any commercial guild or brother- 
hood, sought to become a master workman in it on his own 
account. Nor were these formal or trifling dues. An ordi- 
nance of the year 1687 fixed at 3000 livres the Maitrise pay- 
able by any man on his admission to trade as a Draper. In 
the case of a Druggist, the same ordinance assessed the charge 
at a sum varying from 5000 to 6000 livres. Dispensations 
from serving the apprenticeship at all might also be obtained ; 
and, in such cases, the tariff was higher still. 

The Droit de Greffe was the right of selling various offices 
connected with the custody of judicial records or notarial acts. 
This was an ancient privilege of the French kings, and became 
the basis of a series of remarkable encroachments. First, they 
asserted the right to sell other public offices of far higher im- 
portance. Then they created offices for the express purpose 
of selling them. Then, in the absence of voluntary purchasers, 
they selected persons of wealth, who were constrained to buy 
this royal merchandise at a fixed price. But in all cases, un- 



THE REVENUES OP FRANCE. 355 

til tlie reign of Henry IV., the office was made redeemable at 
a sum which was ascertained either by an express or by an 
implied condition in the original contract. 

Against this fatal abuse, the States- General, the Parliament 
of Paris, and the most eminent statesmen and writers of France 
(Montesquieu is the eminent and singular exception) never 
ceased to remonstrate with all the weight of their authority 
or their reason. But, till the eve of the Revolution, that abuse 
proved inveterate and incurable. In the time of Louis XIY., 
the number of vendible, and, for the most part, superfluous 
places, exceeded 4000, and the prices of some of them were 
enormous. Toward the close of the seventeenth century, half 
a million of livres was exacted for each of the offices of secre- 
tary of state, of captain of the royal guards, and of first gen- 
tleman of the royal chamber. The office of great chamberlain 
was sold for more than twice that sum. In the catalogue of 
marketable employments we find more than 1900 seats in the 
different Parliaments and other royal tribunals. These' were 
for wealthy and ambitious purchasers. To the less aspiring 
were offered the offices of controllers of the royal butter, tast- 
ers of the royal cheese, inspectors of the royal piggeries, and 
so on. Nor were these bad investments of money. The min- 
isters, counselors, and judges, if ignoble, acquired, in vhtue 
of their purchases, most of the privileges, and all the immuni- 
ties of the Noblesse. The guardians of the palate and diges- 
tion of their sovereign also acquired an exemption from the 
burdens and indignities to which other roturiers were subject, 
such as the performance of corvees, the payment of tallies, and 
the lodging of soldiers in their houses. Eventually, as we 
shall hereafter see, the greater part of the vendible offices in 
the courts of justice became hereditary in the families of the 
purchasers on the condition of the payment of an income tax, 
usually known as the Paulette. 

As administrator of the central government, the King of 
France also derived a large revenue from the control which he 
exercised over the coinage. Under the early Capetians, indeed, 
every great feudatory struck and issued money of his own for 
circulation within his own fief. But this power was gradually 
taken from them and transferred to the crown bj'^ a series of 
ordinances, commencing with the reign of Louis IX., and term- 



356 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 

mating witli that of Charles YIII. In vntne of this preroga- 
tive, the king received, on all. new coins, a seignorage, which 
represented, and which was supposed to correspond with, the 
cost of fabricating them. In the days of St. Louis that sup- 
position was probably well founded ; for, in later days, his 
management of the royal mint was always appealed to as the 
equitable standard for the observance of his successors. Those 
popular reclamations were, however, long ineffectual. To call 
in the outstanding specie, and to issue it again of a debased 
quality, but at the old nominal value, was one of the common 
resources of the treasury at all periods of great national dis- 
tress. It was adopted in the disastrous reigns of John and of 
Charles YI., and amid those calamities which overcast the 
evening of the life of Louis XIY. It was employed, without 
any such apology, by Philippe le Bel, so recklessly as to earn 
for him the sobriquet of Philip the Forger. Nor were these 
dishonest acts declined by our Henry Y. during his temporary 
administration of the government of France. Thus the seign- 
orage properly due on gold and silver money was a legitimate, 
though not a very important method of recruiting the royal 
revenue. But the changes of the intrinsic worth of that money, 
which were made under the shelter of that prerogative, were 
at once among the most scandalous and the most lucrative of 
the means by which the treasury was replenished. 

Fourthly. I pass on to the consideration of the extraordi- 
nary revenues of the French kings. These were composed of 
the proceeds of the taxes levied under the authority of fiscal 
ordinances. 

Direct taxes, that is, the exaction of pecuniary payments 
for the support of the royal fisc, originated, first, in those serv- 
ices, military or servile, which the vassals, noble or ignoble, 
owed to their feudal lords ; and, secondly, in their obligations 
to offer a certain tribute to him on the marriage of the lord's 
eldest daughter, and on the admission of his eldest son to the 
dignity of knighthood. All these burdens were, in process of 
time, commuted for money payments or failles, and such failles 
were voted, as occasion required, by the court or Parliament 
of the Fief. The municipal vassals enjoyed, under their char- 
ters, the double privilege of granting or refusing such imposts 
at their pleasure, and of being exempt from the liability to 



THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 857 

make sncli grants at all teyond the limits of a certain pre- 
scribed maximum. 

The tailles thus drawn hy the seigneurs from their vassals 
within their respective seigneuries, were also drawn by the 
king from his vassals within the royal domain. It was not 
till the twelfth century that, in order to promote objects of 
common interest to the nation at large, he ever received or de- 
manded such a tribute from all the provinces of the kingdom. 
It was then raised by the intervention and ministry of the great 
feudatories, and of their respective feudal courts. They im- 
posed, and received, and paid over to the king what was thence- 
forward called the royal taille, in contradistinction from the 
seignorial taille. 

Philippe le Bel (as I formerly had occasion to observe) was 
the author of another and more momentous innovation. He 
first raised a royal taille under the authority of grants made, 
or supposed to be made, by the representatives of the Noblesse, 
the Clergy, and the Commons. That practice (as we have 
seen) afterward became common, and even habitual. But it 
was comparatively unusual to convene for this purpose the 
States- Greneral of the whole kingdom. The more frequent 
habit was to summon separately the States either of Langue- 
doil or of Languedoc, or of the particular provinces. 

In the origin of this system, the States, whether general or 
provincial, were accustomed to collect, by officers of their own 
appointment, the supplies which they granted for the service 
of the crown. Nine deputies, that is, three from each of the 
three orders, were constituted superintendents. Subordinate 
to them were commissioners and receivers-genexal for the dif- 
ferent provinces; and other officers called E his, \Yh.o appor- 
tioned the charge among the cities, communes, parishes, and 
individuals liable to it. The Elus were so called, because 
they were elected by the contributors. 

In the reigns of Charles V. and of Charles VII., however, 
all these appointments were superseded by royal nominations, 
except indeed that, in what were called the Pai/s d'Etafs, the 
Elus still retained their independent origin and powers. The 
Pays d'Etats were composed of those provinces in which the old 
provincial States were still accustomed to assemble. The rest 
of France were divided into what were called Pays d Election. 



358 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OP 

The taille was a tax imposed at once in rem and in per- 
sonam ; that is, each contributor was rendered personally li- 
able to pay a sum proportionate to the estimated value of his 
immovable property. It was not, however, levied equally in 
all places. All free cities (as we have already noticed) enjoyed 
a peculiar immunity as to the amount of this impost. Many 
cities, and some rural districts, were permitted to purchase a 
permanent and total exemption from it. In the reigns of the 
sons of Hemy II. such sales were especially numerous. Nei- 
ther was the taille levied equally on all persons. The nobles 
were free from it, partly because it was originally a tax paid 
to them, and not by them ; partly because they (as it was al- 
leged) rendered personally, in the field, the services from which 
their vassals were discharged by the payment of this tax ; and 
partly because to engage in any kind of commerce would have 
worked a forfeiture of their rank ; and yet, without such com- 
mercial dealings, they could not acquire the money necessary 
for acquitting themselves of such a liability. The clergy were 
also exempt, not only because they too were unable to enter 
into any trade, but chiefly on account of the privilege which 
they enjoyed, and on account of the duty which they invari- 
ably performed, of imposing on themselves their share of the 
public burdens of the state. The members of the sovereign 
courts, as a new though inferior noblesse, and the officers of 
the crown, on account of the dignity of their employer, par- 
ticipated in this valuable privilege. The result was, that the 
taille was a property tax affecting the roturiers exclusively. 
During long ages they bore this burden with an impatience 
which exhibited itself sometimes in indignant expostulations, 
sometimes in bitter jests or satirical songs, often in tumults 
and seditions, and always in that estrangement between the 
privileged and unprivileged classes, which was destined, in the 
fullness of time, to overwhelm all the privileges and all the 
institutions of the monarchy in one common ruin. 

The Capitation tax was another direct impost, which orig- 
inated in the wars and financial embarrassments of the reign 
of Louis XIY. It was designed to afford an impressive con- 
trast to the aristocratic injustice of the taille. For the purpose 
of this impost, the people of France were divided into twenty^ 
two classes, in the first of which stood alone the Dauphin and 



THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 359 

the other princes of the blood. From the rate at which they 
were assessed, to the rate which attached to the smallest con- 
tributors, the scale descended by regular gradations through 
each successive class, the rich paying according to their wealth, 
and the poor according to their poverty. But between this 
equitable theory and the actual practice there was a wide dis- 
tinction. The clergy were permitted to purchase an entire 
exemption from this burden on easy terms. The noblesse 
were permitted to choose assessors for themselves from their 
own body. The Pays cPEtats were allowed to commute the 
tax for a fixed contribution. The burden thus fell, as usual, 
with the heaviest pressure on the roturiers and on the Pays 
d' Election ; that is, on the persons and on the places which 
were unprotected by any peculiar franchises. 

The Dixieme was, in substance, identical with the income 
tax, with which we are ourselves so familiar, the rate being 
the same as with us during the later years of the last war. 
It was payable on incomes of every kind ; and it affected alike 
all classes of society, not excepting even the members of the 
royal house. The people of France at first cheerfully endured 
it as a burden necessary for enabling Louis XIV. to repel the 
threatened humiliations of G-ertruydenberg. When that dan- 
ger had passed away, incomes derived from land were relieved 
from this burden. In its altered form and diminished range 
it became, like all other direct taxes in France, a charge from 
which the privileged orders were, to a great extent, permitted 
to withdraw. 

In addition to the direct imposts, which were thus payable 
by the contributors in money, there were others which were 
levied on them indirectly ; that is, in the form of duties on 
articles of general consumption. 

Aides (a word for which the expression, " duties of excise," 
is the best equivalent in our own fiscal vocabulary) were first 
inflicted on the French people in consequence of the iniquitous 
wars and invasions of Edward III. They had, indeed, been 
paid before that time in particular fiefs and during brief peri- 
ods ; but thenceforward they became both permanent and uni- 
versal. The States- Greneral of 1355 extended them to the sales 
of every description of merchandise. 

The constitutional jealousy of the States and of the people 



360 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 

of France, even when most wakeful on other subjects, slum- 
bered strangely when their kmgs assumed the right to impose 
taxes, not on the persons, hut on the property of their people. 
Their acquiescence in the "assertion and exercise of so danger- 
ous a prerogative is best explained by the aristocratic contempt 
in which merchants and their pursuits were so long held among 
them, and by the consequent aristocratic habit of regarding 
trade as a matter which might be abandoned, without anxiety 
or inconvenience, to the absolute authority and regulation of 
the crown. In this, however, as in all other respects, the 
Pays d'Etats seem to have been in advance of the rest of the 
kingdom. They habitually, if not invariably, maintained the 
practice of sanctioning, by votes of the provincial States, every 
imposition of aides within their respective provinces. 

There were, of course, great variations from time to time, 
both as to the rates at which the aides were payable, and as 
to the articles on which they were charged ; but in general it 
may be said that wine and other liquors were the chief or only 
commodities on the retail of which such taxes were imposed ; 
other goods being assessed for this purpose only when sold by 
wholesale, and then at a much lower rate ad valorem. 

The aides were almost invariably leased out to farmers ; 
and the granting of such leases was a source of lucrative pat- 
ronage to the crown, and of grievous oppression to the people ; 
for, even in the collection of these indirect duties, the spirit of 
^privilege and exclusion was not altogether dormant. It was 
in a manner peculiar to themselves that the clergy and nobles 
paid them on merchandise purchased for their own consump- 
tion ; and the inhabitants of particular districts were allowed 
to purchase a permanent exemption from them. 

The Douanes, or revenue of customs, originated in France 
on political rather than on fiscal or commercial grounds. The 
great feudatories were accustomed to forbid the removal, from 
their respective fiefs, of wine, corn, or any other of tKe neces- 
sary articles of life, until they were satisfied that a supply 
existed within those precincts adequate to the wants of the 
inhabitants. "Whatever they regarded as in excess of those 
wants they permitted the owners to export ; requiring, how- 
ever, that in every such case the exporter should be furnished 
with a license, for which he paid such a price as the seigneur 



THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 361 

saw fit to exact. In imitation, though, on a larger scale, of 
this example, the kings of France interdicted the removal, 
from the kingdom itself, of any raw or manufactured produce, 
except by their own special authority. The price paid, whether 
for the seignorial or for the royal license, constituted in real- 
ity, though not in name, duties of export. 

In process of time, that name, les Droits cV Exportation, 
followed the substance and defined it. Export duties were 
then distmguished into four classes. These were, 1st, the 
Droit de Haut-passage ; that is, the payments due for licen- 
ses to export goods beyond the realm ; 2dly, the Droit de Reve; 
that is, the per centage payable on goods bought for exporta- 
tion by any alien ; 3dly, the Droit d'' Imposition for aine, which 
was, in fact, an enhancement of the two former demands to 
meet certam occasional exigencies ; and, 4thly, the Droit de 
Domaine foraine, which was first imposed by Henry II. in 
substitution for the three former, and which differed from a 
modern tariff" of export duties in nothing except, first, that it 
applied not to all the realm, but only to the greater part of it ; 
and except, secondly, that it applied not to a few only, but to 
all of the articles which could be exported thence. 

Duties of import, Droits d'' Importation, were of much later 
introduction in France. Till the sixteenth century there was 
httle or no domestic industry demanding protection, or capable 
of receiving it. But, in the reigns of Henry II. and Henry 
HI., the import duties were established by royal ordinances, 
which fixed such imposts on almost all articles, at the same 
uniform rate of two per cent, ad valorem. AVhat I have 
farther to state on this subject of Douanes will, however, be 
best reserved till we reach the administrations of Sully and of 
Colbert. 

The Octrois were originally duties which, by the permission 
of the seigneur, any city was accustomed to collect on liquors 
and some other goods, brought within its precincts for the con- 
sumption of the inhabitants. "What was thus paid was at first 
appropriated to the civic expenditure. Afterward the king 
authorized the imposition of octrois, to enable the municipali- 
ties the more easily to raise the aides necessary for his own 
service. In still later times, Charles IX. himself imposed a 
tax on all wines brought into any fortified places, with the de- 



362 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 

sign, as it seems, of substituting that local charge for the yet 
more unpopular taille. The imposts levied at the city gate 
having thus ceased to be exclusively a civic fund, either in 
their origin or in their use, the way was opened for that final 
innovation of which Emeri, one of the superintendents of 
finance during the minority of Louis XIV., was the author. 
By an ordinance of that period, the octrois throughout France 
were made payable to the royal treasury ; and, to indemnify 
the citizens for the loss, they were authorized to impose on 
themselves similar duties of equal amount, as a provision for 
their own local charges. When we shall have advanced to the 
time of Colbert's ministry, it will be necessary to recur to this 
subject, and to explain the sequel of this invasion of the priv- 
ileges and the property of the Bourgeois of the kingdom. 

The Droit de Timbre, or stamp duties, formed, in the six- 
teenth century, a part of the annual budget of every French 
minister of finance. They were imposed on bills of exchange, 
on paper, cards, dice, gold and silver plate, and wrought iron. 

The Gabelle, in the modern and more contracted use of the 
term, was the duty on salt, which seems to have provoked 
more frequent commotions and a more bitter resentment than 
any other article in the long catalogue of the fiscal burdens of 
the people. The salt mines and marshes of France were orig- 
inally wrought by licenses from the seigneurs of the fiefs in 
which they were situate ; but, in the fourteenth century, all 
the salt gathered in any part of the royal domain was made 
the subject of a royal monopoly. Under the superintendence 
of crown officers were established depots, where alone that 
article could be sold by those who had collected it, or pur- 
chased by those who were desirous to consume it. The royal 
salt merchant paid the producers of salt according to a tariff, 
which was from time to time adjusted between them, by ref- 
erence to the average prices at the retail markets. Another 
tariff determined the rate at which the consumer was to re- 
ceive his supplies ; but no one was allowed to exercise his own 
discretion as to the purchase or rejection of this commodity. 
Four times in each year every householder was compelled to 
buy as much salt as a third tariff determined to be the proper 
quantity, regard being had to the number and to the ages of 
the members of his family. 



THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 363 

It is superfluous to point out the vexations and absurdities 
of such a system. To enhance them, the usual inequalities 
were maintained in the execution of it. The privileged orders 
were permitted to supply then- own domestic wants hy deduct- 
ing what was requisite for that purpose from the produce of 
their own salt-mines or marshes. In various provinces total 
or partial exemptions from the gabelle were established, and 
the charge was consequently rendered at once more oppressive 
and more invidious in those places in which the weight of it 
was entirely unmitigated. It was, nevertheless, too lucrative 
an impost to be abandoned, even by the most equitable and 
magnanimous of the statesmen of France under the old mon- 
arch)^ Sully, Hichelieu, Colbert, and many others, mtroduced 
or attempted various modifications of the system ; but it re- 
mamed to the last a grinding and offensive monopoly of one 
of the absolute necessaries of human existence. 

In 1664 another article was subjected to similar restric- 
tions ; and, though they affected no small proportion of the 
whole people, I am aware of no proof that, in this instance, 
any serious discontent, or even any grave remonstrances, were 
ever provoked by the demand. By a sort of universal consent, 
in which even the consumers of tobacco themselves acquiesce, 
the legislator of every civilized country is encouraged to sub- 
ject it to duties of the highest possible amount, which will 
really produce the highest possible revenue. For this purpose, 
the importation of it into France was entirely prohibited, ex- 
cept at a few specified ports. When imported there, it was 
received into the stores of the government, and the privilege 
of retailing it was then sold to the farmers-general for the 
benefit of the treasury. The indigenous growth of tobacco 
was forbidden ; not, mdeed, absolutely, but in all cases in 
which the cultivator did not observe various restraints and 
precautions designed for the prevention of the contraband trade. 

In the preceding enumeration of the sources of the revenue 
of the French kings, I, of course, have not attempted to in- 
clude them all, but only such of them as were the most pro- 
ductive, or such as are most frequently mentioned by the 
French historians. It was not, however, from any of the ways 
and means already noticed that a king of France was accus- 
tomed to provide for the most importunate wants of his ex- 



364 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 

chequer. To meet the greater casualties of war, and not sel- 
dom to provide for the lus;uries and extravagance of his court 
and household, he raised loans at his pleasure, to v^hatever ex- 
tent he could procure them, on the pledge either of the whole 
or of any particular branches of his revenue. This is not the 
proper occasion to refer to the calamities which resulted from 
the habitual use and abuse of the public credit. But it may 
be convenient to observe that the Rentes sur P Hotel de Ville, 
of which we so constantly read, were the dividends which, by 
the terms of any such contract, were payable at the Hotel de 
Ville either of Paris or of any other city. That locality was 
chosen for the convenience of the rich citizens, and as an ad- 
ditional inducement to them to lend their money. But the 
term does not necessarily imply that the Rentes were to be 
discharged out of civic funds, or even by civic officers ; al- 
though on some occasions, and to a certain extent, those funds 
might be pledged, and those officers employed for that purpose. 

To this very imperfect summary of the elements of the pub- 
lic revenue in France, I proceed to add a still more imperfect 
statement of the methods by which it was collected, expended, 
and audited. That unavoidable imperfection will not, howev- 
er, I trust, in either case, defeat my immediate object, which 
is merely that of elucidating several passages in the history of 
that kingdom, which must always" be obscure to those who have 
not a general acquaintance with, at least, the outline of these 
financial and fiscal arrangements. 

Under the Capetian dynasty the earliest administrators of 
the finances of the crown were the great chamberlain and the 
other high officers of the royal household. To them succeed- 
ed the baillis and the prevots, who, within their respective 
jurisdictions, were not only judges m all revenue cases, but 
also receivers, paymasters, and administrators of the produce 
of all dues and imposts ov/ing to the king. The baillis and 
prevots were themselves accountable to the Royal Council, or 
to the committee of that body which ultimately acquired the 
distinctive title of the Chambre des Comptes, 

As in many other respects, so in this, St. Louis was at once 
an original, an enlightened, and a cautious reformer. By him 
was given the first example of an effectual separation of the 
judicial and the financial departments from each other. His 



THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 365 

measure, indeed, applied only to the city of Paris ; but it af- 
forded at once the principle and the precedent for similar in- 
novations in the other parts of the royal domain. His suc- 
cessors, in imitation of it, gradually but completely excluded 
the baillis and prevots from all direct intervention in the re- 
ceipt or expenditure of the public money, and committed that 
duty to a new class of officers called Receivers. 

Still farther to centralize the fiscal economy of France, 
Philippe le Bel created a new ministry. At the head of it he 
placed an officer of high rank, entitled the Superintendent 
Greneral of Finance ; and, in subordination to him, he appoint- 
ed other officers designated as Treasurers. 

In the time of Charles V. there appear to have been only 
three such treasurers. Of these one was stationary at Paris, 
while the other two migrated throughout the different provin- 
ces, which, at that time, were embraced within the royal do- 
main. In those circuits they investigated the conduct, exam- 
ined into the contracts, and inspected the books of the various 
local receivers, and of all other persons through whose hands 
the public money passed. 

The treasurers rendered their own accounts to the Chambre 
des Comptes. 

The Chambre des Comptes had much in common with the 
Parliament of Paris, which, to a certain extent, participated in 
its functions. But the concord of those bodies was not much 
promoted by the kind of partnership which thus existed be- 
tween them. The Parliament regarded the powers of the 
Chambre des Comptes with constant jealousy, and habitually 
endeavored to abridge them. 

The Chambre des Comptes, on the other hand, asserted for 
themselves the attribute of judicial sovereignty ; that is, they 
maintained that their judgment in fiscal suits or prosecutions 
could neither be reversed, amended, nor reviewed by any other 
tribunal. The Parliament denied to them this privilege, and 
insisted that they were themselves entitled to receive appeals 
from any such judgments. This dispute was at length settled 
by Charles VI. in favor of the Chambre des Comptes and 
against the Parliament. Again, however, arose a contest be- 
tween them respecting the revision of the sentences of the sub- 
ordinate financial officers or judges, either court claiming an 



366 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 

exclusive authority to receive appeals from sucli sentences ; 
and again the pretensions of the Chambre des Comptes were 
supported by the king. Yet it wsls impossible to draw with a 
/firm hand every part of the line defining the respective provin- 
ces of the two courts. The interests of the public revenue 
were so intimately blended with the interests of other branches 
of the public administration, that the members of each tribunal 
often met in the same place, and deliberated and acted in com- 
mon upon questions falling at once within the appropriate prov- 
inces of each of them. There were also occasions when such 
of the members of the Chambre des Comptes as were in holy 
orders abdicated their places to lay members of the Parliament, 
as when a public accountant was to be tried for a crime which 
might induce a capital punishment. 

In those provinces which, though reunited to the crown, did 
not form a part of the royal domain, there were separate Cham- 
bres des Comptes, and from their adjudications an appeal might 
be brought to the Chambre des Comptes at Paris. 

In the fifteenth century, however, the jurisdiction of that 
chamber was materially abridged. Till then, like our own 
Court of Exchequer, it had been at once an office for auditing 
the public accounts and a tribunal for deciding all contentious 
cases affecting the revenue of the crown. The incongruity of 
these functions was sooner perceived and more frankly aoknowl- 
leged in Prance than in England, and to obviate the inconve- 
niences of it another committee of the royal council was con- 
stituted, with the title of the Cour des Aides. To the Cham- 
bres des Comptes were reserved its ancient administrative 
functions, the judicial duties of that chamber being transfer- 
red to the new committee. 

The Cour des Aides was declared by Charles YII. to be sov- 
ereign, in the sense in which I have already explained that ex- 
pression. The difficulty, however, of finding an exact line of 
demarcation between the attributes of the different chambers 
was rather increased than diminished by this enlargement of 
their number. The Chambre des Comptes continually object- 
ed that the Cour des Aides were taking cognizance of questions 
really administrative, and in name only judicial. The Parlia- 
ment were not less prompt to object that the Cour des Aides 
took cognizance of cases as involving a fiscal accountability to 



THE REVENUES OF PRANCE. 367 

the crown, wliich really fell within their own jurisdiction, as 
involving a breach of the general penal law. How completely 
these controversies refused the solution of any precise and def- 
inite rules, may he inferred from an ordinance of Francis II., 
of the year 1559, which directs that " les causes connexes'^ 
should he " traiUes par les deux cours fraternellement et 
aimiahlement?'' 

It would he a great error to draw from the preceding state- 
ments the inference that, as early as the fourteenth and fif- 
teenth centuries, the fiscal administration of France had heen 
reduced into a comprehensive, a well adjusted, or a regnilar sys- 
tem. Of the regulations to which I have reverted, few were 
in force beyond the precincts of the royal domain. In each of 
the provinces not within those precincts there were laws or 
customs more or less peculiar to itself, for regulating the re- 
ceipt and expenditure of the public money, and the audit of 
the public accounts. With the increase of the national re- 
sources in the sixteenth century came a proportionate increase 
of the pecuniary embarrassments of the court and of the bur- 
dens of the people, and in the train of those burdens came so 
rapid a succession, and so great a variety of schemes for the 
management of the royal revenue, that it would be idle to at- 
tempt to compress, within the time at my disposal, any intel- 
ligible account of them. I must confine myself to a brief no- 
tice of such of those changes as it is most necessary to under- 
stand, with a view to the correct apprehension of the history 
of France. 

1st. Then ; in the reign of Charles YII., the proceeds of the 
royal domain were all made payable into the hands of one of 
the treasurers, who thenceforward acquired the title of Clian- 
geurs du Tresor. The proceeds of the whole revenue of im- 
posts were at the same time made payable to an officer desig- 
nated as the Receiver- g-eneral. 

2dly. Francis I. added to the two last-mentioned officers 
a third of the same general description, who was entitled the 
Tresorier de VEpargne, to whom were made payable all the 
proceeds of what was collectively called the casual revenue. 

3dly. It was not till long after the sixteenth century that 
any approach was made in France to the national system of 
establishing a consolidated fund of the whole income of the 



368 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT, ETC. 

crown, from wliioli to defray the wliole of the public expend- 
iture. Each particular branch of the revenue was at that 
time appropriated to particular charges. Consequently, the 
Changeurs du Tresor, the Receiver-general, and the Tresorier 
de I'Epargne, each applied his receipts in satisfaction of those 
particular demands for which each was separately responsible. 

4thly. But the Tresorier de I'Epargne soon greatly sur- 
passed his two colleagues in the comparative importance of 
his functions. He became the keeper of a chest, into which 
the joint receipts of himself, of the Changeurs du Tresor, and 
of the Receiver-general were all accumulated, though not all 
blended together. Such was the importance of his office, that 
Francis I., the author of it, expressly enacted that it should 
never be vendible. 

5thly. To the same monarch was owing the division of 
that part of France which was called the Pays d' Election mto 
sixteen districts, called Generalites. They were so called be- 
cause each constituted a financial department of Recettes Ge- 
nerales, at the head of each of which was placed a receiver- 
general. To each receiver-general were made payable, in the 
first instance, the proceeds arising within his generalite from 
the revenue of the royal domain, from the revenue of imports, 
and from the casual revenue. 

6thly. Henry II. attached to each generalite a treasurer- 
general for the assistance, and a controller-general for the su- 
pervision, of the receiver-general. 

7thly. Henry III. established at Paris a financial council, 
called the Bureau Central des Finances. It was composed 
of two treasurers and of two receivers-general. In each gene- 
ralite he created similar offices. These institutions, though 
probably at first established for much more extensive pur- 
poses, do not appear to have been intrusted with any real pow- 
er in the administration of the revenue. They seem rather to 
have been called into existence by the jealousy with which, in 
that disastrous reign, the king regarded all the ministers of 
his own authority, and to have been employed chiefly or ex- 
clusively as inspectors and checks upon the malversations of 
other officers of finance. 

Stilly. The Chambre des Comptes, amid all these vicissi- 
tudes, retained the general audit of the public accounts. But 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 369 

Francis I. invented, and his successors continued, a device "by 
which that audit was rendered inejffectual in respect of any 
money which it was the pleasure of the king himself to spend 
for his own personal gratification, or, as it was expressed, for 
his menus plaisirs. For such issues the public accountant 
acquitted himself, hy producing to the court a simple order or 
check for the money, under the royal sign manual. Such 
orders acquired the name, so ill-omened in French history, of 
Ordonnances de Comptant. 

The subsequent changes in the financial institutions of 
France will be most conveniently noticed when we reach the 
administrations of Sully, of Richelieu, and of Colbert. The 
preceding retrospect of the methods by which the revenue of 
the French kings was raised, received, expended, and audited 
in earlier times, tedious as it may have been, will yet, I trust, 
derive some interest from the light which it will throw on the 
subject to which I propose to direct your attention when we 
shall next meet. I shall then endeavor briefly to indicate the 
chief passages in the financial history of France, in the hope 
that they will conduct us to the solution of the question which 
I proposed at the commencement of this lecture — the question, 
that is. How did it happen that the Power of the Purse, which 
the theory of the French Constitution ascribed to the national 
representatives, never yielded in France its legitimate fruit of 
constitutional freedom ? 



LECTURE XJV. 

ON THE POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

The rapid sketch M^hich I laid before you when we met last, 
of the sources and of the management of the revenue of the 
kings of France, will now enable me to advance to a review, 
not less abridged, of some of the more remarkable incidents in 
the financial history of that country ; after which I hope to 
make intelligible my answer to our proposed inquiry, "AVhy 
the growth of the Monarchical Despotism was not arrested by 
that Power of the Purse, which in theory at least belonged to 
the Seignorial Courts and to the States-General." 

A A 



370 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

When Hugues Capet ascended the throne, and converted his 
vast hereditary estates from a mere fief or county into the do- 
main of the crown, and into the only independent source of the 
royal revenue, the exigencies of his times and of his position 
constrained him to alienate no inconsiderable part of it in favor 
of his more powerful vassals. He forbade his successors to im- 
itate his own example. But necessity overcame the remem- 
brance or the authority of this prohibition. Like himself, each 
of his early descendants transmitted to his heir the royal do- 
main shorn and narrowed by grants of very inconvenient mag- 
nitude. 

The early Capetian kings, impoverished by these donations, 
were compelled to apply to their greater feudatories, or tenants 
in capite, for aid to meet the indispensable exigencies of the 
public service. On such occasions each lord convened the 
feudal court or assembly of his vassals. Having ascertained 
what was the amount of the funds required from them to meet 
the demand, they apportioned that amount among all the per- 
sons and the estates within the seigneurie which were liable 
to contribute to it. Such failles, raised by means of such as- 
semblies, constituted the only extraordinary resource of the 
earlier kings of the race of Hugues Capet in any war which 
his own ordinary resources were inadequate to support. 

When Louis le G-ros conferred charters of emancipation on 
the communes in the duchy of France, those kings for the first 
time acquired a regular revenue, not measured by, nor depend- 
ent on the legal obligations either of their immediate or of their 
more remote vassals. Within those communes, the citizens, by 
the terms of then" charters, became liable to equip and main- 
tain a militia for the king's service in his wars, or to pay to 
him an annual tribute in money. 

The pecuniary wants of the royal government increased with 
its increasing strength. They were especially augmented by 
the heavy charges which the public treasury incurred for the 
/, support of the Crusades. It therefore became necessary to ex- 
plore new financial resources ; and, under the pressure of such 
difficulties, Louis YH., for the first time, hazarded the impo- 
sition, by his own authority, of a tax of one tenth of the esti- 
mated income of every free layman in France. The apology 
for this great usurpation was found in the sanctity of the ob- 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 371 

ject in view. It was to defray the expense of the expedition 
of Louis to the Holy Land. The complaints were general and 
vehement ; hut, for a time, they were silenced by the supposed 
piety of the motives of the royal innovator. In that faith the 
people submitted to the burden, and a considerable sum was 
collected. 

Such a precedent could not, of course, long remain unfruit- 
ful. Accordingly, Philippe Auguste imposed on his subjects 
what was called the Sa ladin Tithe ; that is, an annual tax of 
the tenth of every man's income, to be applied to the deliver- 
ance of Jerusalem from the power of Saladin. "Warned, how- 
ever, by the clamors which the impost of Louis YIL had ex- 
cited, Philippe Auguste obtained, from an assembly of prelates 
and barons, their sanction for this tribute. During the first 
year it was paid with a reluctant acquiescence ; but, when 
the demand was repeated, the resistance of the people at large 
became so stern and resolute, that even that powerful mon- 
arch was constrained to prohibit the farther collection of the 
Saladin Tithe. 

This disappointment induced him to devise a new and less 
invidious source of revenue. I refer to the exaction of money 
from the Jews. Strange as it may sound to ourselves, this 
henceforth became a regular and important part of the ways 
and means of the royal exchequer. In that age, as it has 
been often observed, a Jew was a kind of sponge, contmually 
imbibing a rich moisture, to be as continually wrung out by 
the rapacious grasp of power. The Venetians, the Grenoese, 
and the Pisans had at this time the entire conduct of naviga- 
tion, as the Lombards had an exclusive enjoyment of com- 
merce. But the Jews maintained an absolute and undisputed 
possession of the money-market. Their consciences were not 
affected by the denunciations of usury by the Church ; and 
the law which forbade their acquiring land drove them to in- 
vest their property in whatever other forms were m.ost easily 
portable. The risks attendant on the loan of such property 
occasioned, and even justified, the enormous rates of interest 
which they demanded. To diminish that risk, it was their 
custom to admit some needy but powerful patron into a part- 
nership in their profits ; and the king, who depended on them 
for advances of money on the credit of his future revenue, was 



872 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

secretly well pleased that, in their dealings with others, they 
should ohtain advantages which, in their dealings with him- 
self, enabled them to assist him with the greater facility and 
on the easier terms. 

In that ignorant age, the Jews and the Lombards were alone 
possessed of the arts of arithmetic and book-keeping. They 
thus became, in most European countries, the managers of 
the public revenue. From their real or supposed abuses of 
this power came into use the word mal-tolte, so frequent in 
French history — a word compounded, according to the Latin- 
ity of the times, of the two words mala and tolta. What they 
thus usuriously gained, they held, of course, on the most pre- 
carious tenure ; and to escape, as far as possible, the exactions 
to which they were exposed by the cupidity of the king and 
the bigotry of the people, the Jews became the inventors of 
commercial bills of exchange — a device which enabled them 
to withdraw their funds out of any country without the haz- 
ard of the transmission of specie, and without the necessity 
of their own personal appearance within the jurisdiction of 
their royal oppressors. 

Thus the Jewish people formed a secret monetary league, 
the ramifications of which extended throughout the whole of 
Christendom, and which was covertly and indirectly favored 
by all the sovereign princes of Europe. Defenseless by the 
law, hated for their religion, and envied for their Avealth, they 
yet, by the strength of that confederacy, became the universal 
bankers of the civilized world. They endured and baffled all 
varieties of torture, indignity, exile, and massacre, and proved 
that commerce, as well as religion, may thrive upon persecu- 
tion. 

From the fiscal tyranny of the whole of the royal line to 
which he bore the relation either of heir or of ancestor, St. 
Louis presents a memorable exception. Six measures signal- 
ize his reign. 1. The one step which he took for increasing 
the ordinary revenue of the crown was that of reserving to him- 
self the Droit d'Amortissement ; that is, the right, when land 
was conveyed to any ecclesiastical body, sole or aggregate, to 
be compensated, by an annual money payment, for the loss of 
those feudal dues which, if the land had remained in lay hands, 
would have been payable on each alienation of it, or on the 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 373 

deaths of all the successive tenants. 2. Instead of preventing 
the frauds of the receivers of the royal revenue hy burning 
Jews, St. Louis established for that purpose those tribunals 
which were afterward called the Chambres des Comptes. 
3. To relieve his people from the oppressions of those great 
feudatories who possessed the droit regalien of coining money, 
he obtained their concurrence in an edict which not only fixed 
a common standard for all coins, whether issued from the royal 
or from the seignorial mints, but which authorized him to pun- 
ish all offenses committed against the coinage laws in any part 
of the kingdom. 4. For the defense of the contributors to the 
royal or seignorial failles, he forbade the imposition of any 
burden of that nature until after an assembly of the vassals 
of the fief on which it was to be levied had been held, to de- 
liberate, not only on the grant itself, but on all the details of 
the measure. 5. He required that, within the domain of the 
crown, the contributors to every such tax should freely choose 
nominees, from whom his own officers were to select such as 
were best qualified to make an equitable apportionment of the 
charge among the persons and the lands liable to it. 6. It 
had been customary for the feudal lords to prevent the export 
or import of grain, or other commodities, beyond the frontiers 
of their seigneuries, except by persons willing to purchase 
licenses for the purpose ; and, by issuing such licenses in fa- 
vor of particular traders only, the seigneurs converted this trade 
into an oppressive and lucrative monopoly. St. Louis forbade 
this practice, and required every seigneur to lay out, on the 
repair or defense of the public roads, the produce of all the tolls 
levied on goods or on passengers traversing them. Humble 
cares these, if contrasted with some of those which have excited 
the enthusiasm of historians and the applause of nations ! pro- 
saic virtues, perhaps, when drawn into comparison with the 
superhuman achievements so liberally ascribed to the real or 
imaginary heroes of the Roman calendar — yet cares such as, 
in the thirteenth century, could have engaged no ordinary in- 
tellect, and virtues surely to be preferred to the most sublime 
prodigies of self-conquering asceticism. 

To Philippe le Hardi, the son and successor of St. Louis, is 
due, as a financier, the single credit of having invented a new 
source of revenue, in the sale of letters patent of nobility. 



874 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

Philippe le Bel improved on this invention. He sold not only 
such patents, but, with them, the privilege of exemption from 
all public taxes in future — an anticipation of the revenues of 
the crown which, in the long catalogue of the desperate plunges 
of financiers in distress, is hardly to be rivaled for unthrift. 
But to have been thus the author of an exemption eventually 
so fatal to his country and his race, was not the single, nor 
even the most scandalous of the devices to which Philippe le 
Bel is indebted for the conspicuous, though inglorious place 
which belongs to him in the financial history of France. 

First, the prerogative of altering, at his pleasure, the stand- 
ard of the coin of the realm, which St. Louis had taken from 
Ms barons and repudiated for himself, was exercised by Philippe 
le Bel without decency and without restraint. His resort to 
this iniquitous method of raising money may be traced in the 
Ordonnances des Rois de France throughout almost every year 
of his reign. When he had large payments to make, he de- 
creased the weight and fineness of the specie. "When he had 
large payments to receive, he augmented both. He thus ha- 
bitually provided for the public service and for his own selfish 
expenditure by a flagrant and undisguised robbery ; and though 
even then sarcasm and ridicule had begun to exercise in France 
some part of that mighty power to which they afterward at- 
tained there, yet the sobriquet of Philippe le faux Monnoyeur, 
which he earned from his people, has come down to us only as 
a record of their ineffectual indignation. 

Of Philip's contest with Boniface VIII. — of his consequent 
convention of prooureurs or syndics of the cities to meet the 
prelates and barons of the realm — of his assembling the depu- 
ties of all those three orders — of the imposts which followed on 
the dissolution of the last of those meetings — on the insurrec- 
tions which followed, and on the various provincial charters, 
and especially the Charte aux Normans, by which at length 
those disturbances were allayed, I briefly touched when ad- 
dressing you on the subject of the States- General in the four- 
teenth century. 

It remains to observe that, in the progress of the controver- 
sy, Philip discovered a mode of imposing on his people a bur- 
den, and of securing for himself and his successors a source of 
wealth, of far higher importance than those duties on the sale 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 375 

of merchandise, which had so vehemently provoked the public 
indignation. 

In the indistinctness which, in that age, hung over the lim- 
its of the royal authority, it was assumed hy Philip, and was 
generally admitted by his subjects, that the regulation of trade 
was a royal prerogative, the limits of which no one could de- 
fine, and with the exercise of which no one could properly in- 
terfere. The king therefore published an ordinance prohibit- 
ing the exportation from France of any goods, whether raw or 
manufactured. Having established this general rule, he pro- 
ceeded to sell licenses for dispensing with it in particular cases. 
A large income was thus easily raised ; and "thus was gradu- 
ally, though imperceptibly, established a real, though not an 
avowed, tariff of export duties of customs ; for the customs 
were nothing more than the substitution of a fixed sum, pay- 
able on all exported goods by any person whatever, for the 
fluctuating sums demanded on licenses for specific exportations 
by particular persons. And to this modification of the rule or 
practice another still more momentous addition was to be ulti- 
mately made by virtue of the same prerogative. Licenses 
were required for importing as well as for exporting goods, 
and the sale of such licenses at a fixed price was precisely the 
same thing as the exaction of duties of import. 

The financial policy of Philippe le Bel was adopted by Louis 
X. He also attempted to raise money by debasing the coin, 
and by imposing ad valorem taxes on the sale of merchandise. 
But the French people had now learned the efficacy of an 
armed resistance to fiscal extortion. They compelled Louis 
to recede from his attempt. They exacted from him a pledge 
that he would never resume it ; and they demanded and ob- 
tained the public execution of Marigny, the superintendent of 
finances, to satiate the popular revenge, and to admonish all 
future financiers of the danger of provoking it. 

Louis X. was, however, but an inapt scholar in the great 
art of conciliating his people. He did not, indeed, attempt to 
revive the ad valorem duties, but, with a perverse ingenuity, 
endeavored to raise money by the sale of judicial offices. The 
impolicy and unpopularity of the measure were enhanced by 
the disingenuous, or, rather, by the false pretexts under which 
it was taken. The offices of the judges could not be sold un- 



376 POWER OP THE PURSE IN PRANCE. 9H 

til they had first been vacated. It was resolved, therefore, to 
expel the actual holders of them from the bench. "With that 
view the king appointed commissioners charged to inquire into 
their judicial conduct. It was a device by which no one was 
blinded ; and as one royal judge after another vras removed 
on the report of this royal inquest, all who heard it knew that 
they were really removed, not for any fault of theirs, but only 
that their seats might be transferred to the highest bidder for 
the succession. 

The wants of the crown were, however, insatiable. To 
supply them, Louis X., with characteristic duplicity, resorted 
to another artifice, the success of which curiously illustrates 
a great truth — the truth, I mean, that, in the distribution of 
her favors. Fame is at least as capricious as Fortune, and still 
more unjust ; and especially so when she awards the laurel of 
philanthropy. 

The want of money, and the determination to raise it by 
hypocritical pretenses when other means were unavailing, 
have procured for Louis no vulgar place among the benefactors 
of mankind. The abolition of slavery is the ground on which 
immortal renown is claimed (and claimed, in some cases, on 
very doubtful or slender grounds) for not a few of those who 
have flourished as philanthropists in our own times. In Louis 
X. of France they had a predecessor in that work, and a par- 
taker in that glory, whom, however, they would have been 
very reluctant to acknowledge as an associate in their labors 
or in their reputation. 

He enacted a law for the emancipation of all slaves within 
the domain of the kings of France. It is impossible to read 
this ordinance without admiring the unbroken continuity of 
character and of style — the indication of character — which has 
prevailed among the legislators of France during the last five 
centuries. Who would doubt that the following enactment 
was a quotation from one of the paper constitutions which 
have been ratified by as many constituent assemblies in the 
same country since the year 1789? "Since" (it begins), "ac- 
cording to the law of nature, all men ought to be free, we, 
considering that our kingdom is called and named France, and 
desiring that the fact may coincide with the word, and that 
all Frenchmen may be free men, do ordain that throughout 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 377 

our realm the servile condition do give place to tlie state of 
liberty." Braver words could not he wished. But, to reach 
the true sense of them, some other aid is necessary than that 
of the dictionary. In order to carry the law into effect, Louis 
nominated a body of commissioners, and to those commission- 
ers he gave instructions, which still remain as the most lu* 
minous commentary on the ordinance itself. 

In France as in Rome, every slave was permitted to acquire 
a peculium, the amount of which seems, however, to have been 
limited either by custom or by law. The commissioners of 
Louis were to ascertain what was the amount of the peculium 
of every slave. They were to insist on that amount being 
paid by each as the price of his emancipation. If the slave 
belonged to the king himself, the whole price was to be paid 
into the royal treasury. If he belonged to any seigneur hold- 
ing of the king, the commissioners were to deduct, for the 
benefit of the seigneur, as much of the money as would fairly 
represent the loss which he would sustain by the enfranchise- 
ment. Similar laws appear to have been mads in imitation 
of this in the fiefs of the greater feudatories. Slavery was in i 
this manner abolished, not, indeed, at the expense of the royal 
treasury as with us, but at the expense of the slaves them- 
selves. The end which was thus accomplished was indeed 
so estimable as to reconcile us to the want of munificence, of 
justice, and even of sincerity, in the means adopted for the 
purpose. If a wiser man than Louis X. had then governed 
France, or if the pecuniary necessities of Louis had been less, 
the land might have yet had to endure the curse of slavery 
through many succeeding years. It is not always to the wise 
or to the good that society is indebted for the greatest social ' 
improvements. 

Philip the Long inherited the wants of his brother and pred- 
ecessor Louis X., but wrestled with them in a bolder and 
more generous spirit. He began by the suppression of im- 
provident pensions, and by the revocation of ill-judged grants 
of the royal domain ; a measure wliich, as might have been 
anticipated, excited to an equal extent the resentment of the 
grantees, and the delight of the people at large. But on the 
people, as well as on the grantees, the financial ingenuity of 
Philip the Long pressed heavily. Many a generation was to 



878 , POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE, 

pass away before their descendants were to cease to groan un- 
der the burden which he transmitted to them. His melan- 
choly distinction as a financier is to have been the author of 
the gabelle, or salt tax. He imposed that impost without the 
concurrence of the States- Greneral, but, as it is conjectured, in 
substitution for some other duties which he remitted. This, 
however, is but. an hypothetical explanation of the undoubted 
fact that the tax was accepted without hostility, and endured 
with no apparent impatience. Perhaps this general submis- 
sion may have been a tribute of the confidence reposed in 
Philip the Long by his subjects, for his memory is unblemish- 
ed by the reproaches which attach to the names of his prede- 
cessors. He was animated by wise and patriotic purposes, 
and labored with zeal, if not with any eminent success, to pro- 
mote a wise economy and a faithful administration of the pub- 
lic treasury by his revenue officers. 

Under the reign of Charles le Bel, the revenue of customs, 
which had originated in the time of Philippe le Bel, in the sale 
of licenses for the exportation of goods, was first levied in the 
more direct form of export duties according to a settled tariff; 
an absurd and suicidal impost ; for it fell on all the main ar- 
ticles of primary necessity, such as grain, hay, cattle, leather, 
wine, salt, and herrings cured by French fishermen, and ren- 
dered the producers of such articles in France unable to com- 
pete, on equal terms, in any other country, with foreign pro- 
ductions of the same kind. 

Nineteen years had now elapsed since the last convention of 
the States- G-eneral of France. During all that time the royal 
power had been striving in vain to secure an adequate public 
revenue without recognizing the right of the contributors them- 
selves to grant or to withhold it. But in the year 1332, Philip, 
the sixth of that name, and the first king of the unhappy house 
of Yalois, was compelled by stern necessity to recur to that 
constitutional resource. The pretensions of Edward HI. to the 
crown of France, though little supported or favored by the peo- 
ple of that kingdom, had yet suggested the obvious policy of 
conciliating them ; for, in England, maxims of government, 
entirely repugnant to those of the French crown, had already 
taken deep root, and the claims of Edward might, therefore, 
be supported by a dangerous appeal to the example and the 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 379 

principles of his hereditary states. PhiHp accordingly sum- 
moned the prelates and barons of his realm, and, as it is said, 
the deputies of his good cities, to meet together at Paris. The 
assembly was propitiated at their meeting, as usual, by a sacri- 
fice to public anger or prejudice. Pierre de Montigny, the su- 
perintendent of finance, had acquired immense wealth, which 
contrasted invidiously with the wants of the public treasury. 
"Whether justly or otherwise, he "was supposed to have grown 
rich by the plunder of the public revenue, and died on the scaf- 
fold to gratify the vindictive jealousy provoked by his wealth 
and imputed crimes. 

The progress of the arms of Edward, however, rendered it 
necessary to conciliate the public favor by sacrifices far more 
costly than the life of a superintendent of finance. In the year 
1338 an ordinance was therefore promulgated by Philip, at the 
request of the barons, clergy, and commons, in which he de- 
clared that " the kings of France would thenceforward never 
levy any extraordinary tribute from the people without the con- 
sent and grant of the Three Estates ; and that each of his suc- 
cessors should swear, on his coronation, to the observance of 
this engagement." I infer, however, from the terms of the or- 
dinance, that it referred, not to the whole of Prance, but to 
Languedoil only. 

In deference to the authority of the best judges, I exclude 
the assemblies of 1832 and of 1338 from the catalogue of the 
States-G-eneral of France. There is, I believe, no extant proof 
that either of them was an elected body, though persons as- 
suming the character of deputies of the Tiers Etat appear to 
have been present at the first, if not at the second of those con- 
ventions. 

So unsettled were the ideas of mankind at that time regard- 
ing the real nature and limits of the respective provinces of the 
different members of the Legislature, that, almost immediately 
after the solemn pledge of the year 1338, Philip himself, with- 
out the consent of the States, or any reference to them, estab- 
lished custom-houses and duties of customs in many parts of 
France, which till then had been exempt from that burden. 
Yet this innovation does not appear to have been resented as 
a breach of faith, or even to have been regarded in that light. 
Apparently, the States abandoned to the king the regulation 



380 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

of commerce as a matter too insignificant to merit their own 
attention. The duties of customs were paid by the Lomhards, 
and the nohles, clergy, and commons of France seem to have 
regarded royal exactions, of whatever amount, from those mer- 
chants with complacency, as transferring so much of the pub- 
lic burdens from the denizens to the foreigner. That the Lom- 
bards repaid themselves in enhanced prices, at the expense of 
the consumers, however familiar a conclusion to ourselves, 
seems not to have occurred to the political economists of that 
age. 

Under the pressure of the wars with England, the conven- 
tions of the States-Greneral for financial purposes became the 
frequent and almost the habitual resource of Philip of Yalois. 
But he labored to defeat their encroachments by dividing their 
power. He rarely, therefore, convoked the States of the whole 
realm collectively. At one time he summoned the Clergy, the 
Noblesse, or the Tiers Etat apart from each other ; at another, 
the States of Languedoo or of Languedoil only, and frequently 
the States of particular provinces alone. In all the different 
forms in which they were called together, these assemblies 
granted subsidies to the king. They consisted chiefly in ad 
valorem duties on the sales of merchandise, and especially of 
liquors. 

The royal prerogative of regulating trade was meanwhile 
maintained and extended. In exercise of it, Philip established 
that monopoly of salt to which I referred in my last lecture. 
It was a measure so universally distressing and distasteful as 
at length to provoke an inquiry into the basis of the royal au- 
thority, real or supposed, in pursuance of which it had been 
taken. The States remonstrated with the king, and the king 
answered their complaints by the assurance that the trade in 
salt should be free as soon as Edward should have retreated 
from France. To Edward the financial embarrassments of his 
rival afforded a ground for merriment as well as for exultation. 
"He is indeed," said the English king, "the inventor of the 
Salic law ;" a play on words memorable partly as perhaps the 
only recorded jest of its celebrated author, and partly because 
it is so near akin to the sarcasm by which the Romans avenged 
themselves on the censor who introduced the salt tax among 
them, whom they punished with the title of Livius Salinator. 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 381 

At Rome as at Paris, it was regarded as a kind of outrage on 
society to impose any such burden on the consumption of an 
article so indispensable to the health of man, and so widely 
diffused by the bounty of nature — an outrage to be expiated 
in France by ridicule when no other vengeance was to be had. 

But even among that laughter-loving race, all mirth was for 
the moment extinguished by the gloom in which the sun of 
Philip Valois was setting. His subjects were crushed beneath 
the weight of failles, tithes, depreciations of the coin, forced 
loans, maltoltes, and continually-increasing taxes. The battle 
of Crecy and the loss of Calais had been followed by famine, 
by pestilence, and by the yet more fearful scourge of hosts of 
undisciplined soldiers, who, roving over the land in armed 
bands, filled it with spoil, and outrage, and desolation. 

In the midst of these calamities the crown descended to 
John. On a former occasion I intimated, as fully as the time 
at my disposal permitted, what was the progress of the finan- 
cial and constitutional struggle by which France was agitated 
during that unfortunate reign — during the regency of Charles 
V. — throughout the wars and the insanity of Charles VI. — 
under the usurpation of Henry V. — and amid the triumphs of 
Charles VII. In reviewing the proceedings of the States-Gren- 
eral convened by those various monarchs, and by Louis XI., 
and during the minority of Charles VIII. , I indicated the gen- 
eral progress of the financial history of France until the com- 
mencement of the Italian wars. My design was then, as it is 
at present, merely to draw an outline which might be filled up 
by your own studies and reflections. I proceed to the comple- 
tion of it. 

On the departure of Charles VIII. from France for the con- 
quest of Naples, he was compelled to make many costly sacri- 
fices for securing his dominions from external enemies during 
his absence. He purchased that advantage by large territorial 
cessions to the empire and to Spain, and by large payments of 
money to England. To raise that money, and to defray the 
expenses of the armament destined for the conquest of Naples, 
he was compelled to borrow largely from the bankers of Grenoa 
and Milan. Such, however, as we learn from Philippe de 
Comines, was the difficulty of effecting those loans, that one 
of the Genoese merchants stipulated for interest on his money 



382 POWER OP THE PURSE IN PRANCE. 

at the rate of 42 per cent, per annum. By tlie aid of those 
advances Charles first won his hrilliant though momentary 
triumph, and then, by the irreparable exhaustion of them, he 
was compelled to allow the French garrisons of his Italian 
conquests to waste away in sickness, in misery, and in famine. 
He returned to France with the shattered relics of his gallant 
army, and with the profound conviction that a complete reform 
in his financial system was indispensable to the accomplish- 
ment of his dreams of extended dominion. He had firmly 
resolved to effect such reformations, when death proved the 
fatal antagonist of this, as of so many other wise and patriotic, 
though tardy intentions. Charles bequeathed his good designs 
as a legacy to Louis XH., his successor. 

Louis frankly accepted and faithfully discharged the obli- 
gation. In the long line of Capetian kings, three only have 
earned or merited the praise of a self-denying economy of the 
public treasure, and they may all be said to have been elevated 
to the number of the Saints. They were Louis IX., who was 
canonized by the Church ; Louis XYL, who was canonized by 
the compassion and esteem of the whole Christian world ; and 
Louis XII., who may be said to have been canonized by his 
people when they bestowed on him the glorious title of their 
Father. But they to whom public monuments are decreed in 
France must needs be distinguished from other men, not only 
by memorable achievements, but by memorable sayings also ; 
and Louis XII. fulfilled each of these conditions of an endur- 
ing celebrity. It was his just and emphatic, though homely 
boast, that in his days a poor man might safely let his poultry 
loose into his paddock. Anticipating Elizabeth of England in 
refusing a grant of money proffered by his subjects, he also 
anticipated her in the wise and kind remark, that the money 
would yield more fruit in their keeping than in his. In the 
same homely but honest spirit he was accustomed to say, that 
a good shepherd would always have fat sheep ; and, in a more 
lofty strain, that he would rather make his courtiers laugh at 
his parsimony, than his people weep at his extravagance. Nor 
were these generous and warm-hearted phrases mere exercises 
of the wit of the royal speaker. They were the genuine in- 
terpretations of his habitual policy. 

He commenced his reign by refusing to collect the Droit de 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 383 

joyeux Avenement. His troops were paid with so exact a 
punctuality, that he was able to punish severely, when he 
could not altogether repress, their customary exactions from 
their fellow-suhjects. Although the noblesse claimed, and 
had exercised, the privilege of exemption from the aides or 
excise duties on liquors sold and retailed by them on their 
own account, he compelled them to sustain that burden. 
Though retaining the gabelle or salt tax, he abolished the 
monopoly of the sale of salt. He remitted a third of the talli- 
ages ; and, in the collection of the remaining two thirds, he 
effectually interdicted the abuses which the royal officers had 
been accustomed to practice with impunity for their own ben- 
efit. Haunted as he was with his predecessor's phantom of 
Italian conquests, he yet rejected, even in aid of that object, 
the vulgar expedient of taxation, and defrayed the expenses 
of that warfare by funds honestly borrowed on the security 
of the royal domain, and honestly paid to the lenders of it. 

Louis Xn. was, perhaps, hardly entitled to the general 
character of an enlightened sovereign. But he enjoyed that 
degree of mental illumination which probity and singleness 
of heart will afford to the simplest. He had the capacity to 
devise, and the integrity to observe, a policy both fiscal and 
political, by which his subjects were protected in the honest 
accumulation of wealth, and in the peaceful enjoyment of it. 
He was rewarded by their gratitude and benedictions. "With- 
out so much as a solitary addition to their public burdens, he 
enjoyed a revenue exceeding, in the proportion of three to one, 
that of the most affluent of the kings who preceded him. The 
number of his subjects, the splendor of his cities, the agricul- 
tural produce of France, her maritime power, her commercial 
capital, and the profits of her trade, foreign and domestic, all 
rapidly increased during the reign of the Father of his people. 
They mourned his death with genuine lamentations, and trans- 
mitted to their children's children the memory of his virtues; 

There is a strange fatality in the affairs of the world, by 
which the rulers of it not seldom sow a harvest of future dis- 
aster even by measures conceived in the most upright, humane, 
and philanthropic spirit. And so it was with some of the acts 
of Louis xn. 

Thus, for example, he required every public accountant, on 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 



his appointment to office, to deposit in the public treasury a 
sum of money as a security against his possible defaults. 
Nothing could have been either better designed or more un- 
fortunate. These preliminary deposits gradually passed into 
a price paid for the office ; and thus the venality of public 
employments, one of the greatest of all abuses, resulted from 
the honest attempt to protect the revenue against abuse. 

So again Louis XII., in the very spirit of Jeremy Bentham, 
had made the public revenue liable to the payment of all the 
expenses of civil actions. The burden proving enormous, he 
then ordained that each suitor should pay his own fees. Noth- 
ing more reasonable ; but observe the result. In those days 
it was the fashion (I know not how else to express it) for a 
successful litigant in a lawsuit to present to the judge a box 
of sweetmeats ; a mark of pleasant courtesy on the one side, 
and of good-humored condescension on the other. But when 
the royal edict was promulgated, expressly rendering the pay- 
ment of his judicial fees the legal obligation of every suitor, 
judicial commentators on that edict determined, first, that the 
box of sweetmeats was a fee ; secondly that the payment of it 
was no longer optional, but obligatory ; thirdly, that it might 
be commuted for a money payment ; and, finally, that the 
amount of pecuniary remuneration might be assessed between 
the successful suitor and the judge, at whatever sum they 
might mutually consider reasonable. The effect of this read- 
ing of the new law was, that, in the highest tribunals of 
France, favorable judgments were openly and unavowedly 
purchased of the judges, and the word epices (by which the 
box of sweetmeats had been always known) acquired a con- 
ventional meaning synonymous with that of the word bribe. 

In these and some other cases it must be admitted that the 
integrity of Louis was not directed by a far-sighted prescience. 
He is one of the many rulers of the world who have demon- 
strated how easy it is to be at once a very honest man and a 
very unskillful legislator. His honesty, however, imparted to 
him the knowledge of many truths which are often hidden 
from the most sagacious monarchs, and among them the truth 
that, in the government of a great nation, there can be no real 
patriotism without an habitual parsimony- 
It was a truth not revealed to his more oslebrated successor, 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 385 

Francis I. Affecting every species of glory to wliicli the world 
renders an idolatrous homage, Francis accepted the worship of 
his flatterers, and repaid it by the spoliation of his subjects. 
His ambition aspired to attain, and his vanity was flattered by 
the assurance that he had actually attained, to the union in 
his own person of three characters, never seen in perfect com- 
bination before — that, as a prince, he was the most powerful ; 
as a cavalier, the most accomplished ; and as a patron, the 
most munificent of all the heroes of his own generation. To 
sustain this three-fold dignity, Francis surpassed all his pred- 
ecessors in extravagance, creating public oflioes as mere arti- 
cles of merchandise, and squandering the price of them with 
the most wanton profusion. Yet who shall dare to assume the 
prophetical office, unaided by actual inspiration ? As some of 
the most upright measures of Louis XII. led the way to results 
which that patriotic prince would have most anxiously depre- 
cated, so some of the most indefensible of the acts of Francis 
led to consequences over which the Father of his people would 
have most cordially rejoiced. 

I have already attempted to explain how the collection and 
management of the various branches of the royal revenue 
werQ, in those times, distributed between the -superintendent 
of finance, the provisional collectors, the receivers-general, the 
farmers-general, the tresoriers de France, and the tresoriers de 
I'epargne. There was then no central treasury, no unity of 
principle, and no established system of disbursing and account- 
ing for the proceeds of the various duties levied for the use of 
the crown. No remedy could be more obvious, and none ap- 
parently more easy, than that of subordinating the receivers- 
general, and all their inferior officers, to one common head. 
But that reform alone, though it would have secured the rev- 
enue from the waste of so many distinct administrations of it, 
would have brought no immediate aid to the ever-necessitous 
Francis. Such aid might, however, be obtained by the crea- 
tion and sale of ten new receiver-generalships ; and to bring 
those offices into the market to the best advantage, it was de- 
sirable to render their powers as extensive, and their emolu- 
ments as large as possible. With this view, and apparently 
with no higher view, all the inferior collectors were subordin- 
ated to the receivers-general, and the receivers-general were 

Bb 



386 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

themselves placed in subordination to the tresorier de I'epargne, 
who thus became the centre and the regulator of the whole 
financial system. Thus concentration was effected in that 
branch of the public service. Selfishness accomplished the 
work of public spirit. The new receivers-general acquired, by 
theu' money, the powers which ought to have been gratuitous- 
ly imparted to their whole body, from a regard for the public 
interest. 

Nor was this centralization of the fiscal duties of the gov- 
ernment the most important advantage of the creation and sale 
of the new offices. Until that time, respect had been practi- 
cally shown to the ancient theory, which dedicated the extra- 
ordinary revenue of the royal domain to the public service, 
but placed the ordinary revenue of it at the absolute disposal 
of the king, according to his unfettered discretion. But that 
distinction was abandoned, both in practice and in theory, when 
the various sources of the royal income, being all made to flow 
through the same official channels of the receivers-general, 
were all brought under the control of the same superior offi- 
cer, the tresorier de I'epargne. Thenceforward the whole re- 
ceipt of the treasury was equally charged with the defense and 
government of the nation. Thenceforward the Parliament 
maintained that their ancient feudal control over the proceeds 
of the royal domain had, by this change, been virtually extend- 
ed to the whole mass of the revenue with which those proceeds 
had been thus inextricably consolidated. By the creation of 
ten new receiver-generalships, Francis had sought, and had ob- 
tained, a round sum of money. As an undesigned consequence 
of that innovation, he imparted unity and method to the finan* 
cial system of France ; he narrowed his own absolute domin- 
ion over his own revenue ; and he enlarged the fiscal powers 
of the single body in the state, whose authority was, to any 
extent, a counterpoise of his own. 

His other financial measures were equally contracted in their 
■design, but were not equally beneficial in their consequences. 
Some of them merit particular notice. 

First. As auditors of the public expenditure, the Chambre 
des Comptes had been accustomed to consider the public ac- 
countants as entitled to an acquittance for all money which 
they had paid over to the king, in order that the king himself 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 387 

might employ such moneys in the public service. The cham- 
ber held it indecorous or unconstitutional to inquire into the 
actual use made of such funds hy the royal receiver of them. 
Availing himself of this courtly reserve, Francis became the 
inventor of that species of check, the mention of which so fre- 
quently occurs in French history under the name of Bons. A 
Bon was an order addressed to the tresorier de I'epargne, un- 
der the royal sign manual, in the following brief and emphatic 
words : " Bon pour mille (or any other number of) livres." 
Such orders were more accurately called "Acquits de Comp- 
tant," because, in the Chambre des Comptes, they were admit- 
ted as a valid acquittance of the accountant. Every one an- 
ticipates the result. To the objects of the royal favor and to 
the ministers of the royal pleasures, Bons were distributed with 
reckless prodigality, and the funds which should have support- 
ed the most unportant public services were thus irretrievably 
diverted to useless, or, rather, to injurious purposes. 

Secondly. To Francis is to be ascribed the unenviable dis- 
tinction of having founded the national debt of France ; for, 
in the annals of his reign, we meet for the first time with the 
rentiers on the Hotel de Yille of Paris ; a class of public cred- 
itors whose claims, even then, amounted to 60,000 livi-es per 
annum, payable out of the revenue which was collected in that 
city, and which was properly applicable, not to royal, but to 
civic purposes. 

Thirdly. Francis was also the author of that enormous in- 
crease of the amount of the failles to which popular resent- 
ment gave the name of la grancle Crue. 

Fourthly. To any one who has ever vexed his soul in 
hunting a point of law through our excise acts, it may be 
some consolation to be told that the edicts of Francis were as 
copious as the statutes of G-eorge the Third, and much more 
original, in all the mysteries of cellar-searchers, inventories, 
and permits. 

Fifthly. Francis had the farther credit or responsibility of 
having rendered the gabelle as oppressive in practice as it was 
always absurd in theory. 

Finally. He is one of the earliest of the protectionists 
known to modern history, and one of the most consistent. Not 
content to protect the silk fabrics of Lyons against Italian and 



388 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

Spanish weavers, and the groceries of France against the 
sweet products of other lands, he made laws to shelter French 
drugs against the medicines of the foreigner ; a consequence 
of the doctrine of universal protection for home-bred commod- 
ities, from which, I suppose, the sternest of its modern advo- 
cates would shrink. 

To employ these cold financial tints in depicting Francis I. 
may seem a kind of profanation. In our popular histories he 
is the hero of the Renaissance. In those pages, arts, sciences, 
and literature revive under his auspices. There he is the in- 
domitable antagonist of Charles Y, He is sententious and 
sublime in the lowest depths of adversity. In an age of dull 
utilitarians and angry polemics, he is still a gallant Trouba- 
dour, now breaking a lance with the bravest, and then doing 
knightly homage to the most beautiful. But when we turn, 
as turn we must, from this brilliant historical romance to our 
dry financial annals, the splendid mirage passes away, and 
nothing is left in sight but the sands of the desert — arid, 
barren, and unprofitable. The Paladin becomes an extortion- 
er. The Maecenas turns into a Sardanapalus, wringing funds 
from the miseries of his people to pamper dissolute wom- 
en and efieminate courtiers ; reveling in selfish waste in the 
very centre of the distress which his own follies had created ; 
squandering on fetes the funds denied to his half-starved arm- 
ies; imposing on his subjects burdens till then unheard of in 
their national history ; and repaying their sacrifices by such 
disasters and defeats as that history had never before recorded. 

The celebrity of Francis I. is the tribute rendered to him 
by the venal authors whom he honored and maintained. But 
such celebrity is calamitous to every people among whom it 
is difiused. He really bequeathed to his subjects nothing bet- 
ter than the memory of wars waged during twenty-eight years 
to gi'atify a puerile and criminal ambition ; of two fruitless 
invasions of Italy ; of the destruction of two gallant French 
armies in that vain enterprise ; of his own captivity and broken 
faith ; of the abandonment of Naples and the Milanese ; of the 
surrender to Spain of Flanders and Artois ; of the hostile in- 
vasion of his northern provinces ; of the insults offered by the 
invaders to his capital ; of a permanent national debt ; and 
of fiscal burdens exceeding eight-fold the revenue which had 






POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 389 

enabled his immediate predecessor to maintain the kingdom 
in prosperity and in peace. Yet to this hour the illusions 
which surrounded the person of Francis in his own day are 
thi'own around his name by the popular literature of his native 
land, and each successive sovereign, or aspirant for the sover- 
eignty of that too sensitive race, is thus, in his turn, admon- 
ished that the single condition on which Frenchmen will ac- 
cept the services or pardon the offenses of any rviler is that he 
shall govern them in such a manner as shall enliance the na- 
tional self-esteem, and as shall satiate, on whatever terms, the 
national thu'st for glory. 

The faults of the four immediate successors of Francis have, 
therefore, received no such absolution as has been pronounced 
over his own ; for their reigns were inglorious, from the com- 
mencement to their close, in whatever light they may be 
viewed, and are especially inglorious if we advert to their 
financial operations. 

At the commencement of the reign of Hemy II., Poitou, 
Guienne, Grascony, and five other less considerable provinces 
rose in arms against the oppressions of the salt tax. The re- 
bellion was fierce, and eventually successful ; for when the 
sword and the ax had exhausted their powers, Henry was 
satisfied or happy to exempt the insurgent states completely, 
and forever, from the obnoxious impost, in return for a large 
sum of ready money. This important branch of the royal rev- 
enue thus ceased to be productive through a large part of the 
kingdom, while, in the provinces which still labored under the 
burden, the productiveness of it was greatly diminished by the 
scarcely less improvident increase of the number and emolu- 
ments of the collecting officers. 

In the creation and sale of useless employments, Henry was 
not content to imitate his father's example. He followed it 
with a recklessness so strange as might seem to have promised 
a speedy and overwhelming ruin. And yet, in obedience to 
one of those strange anomalies in human afFau's to which I 
have so lately referred, in which folly and wisdom employ each 
other's weapons, some of the financial measures of Henry II., 
which, in their motive, were the least defensible, were in their 
result not merely innoxious, but productive of permanent and 
considerable advantages to his people. 



390 POAVER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

I formerly explained how the Sieges Presidiaux gradually 
superseded the royal courts in the provinces of France. By a 
yingle stroke of his pen, Henry created sixty such tribunals ; 
and as each of them was composed of nine judicial officers at 
the least, and usually of a still greater number, this measure 
enabled him to bring to market 600 judgeships at the same 
moment. It is difficult to suppose a ffiiancial resource more 
obnoxious to weighty and unanswerable objections. Yet, in 
reality, it had an effect resembling, as closely as possible, that 
of the law so recently enacted by our own Parliament for the 
establishing county courts in all the considerable towns, of 
England ; a law of which I may, in passing, observe, that it 
is manifestly destined to be the germ of the greatest social 
revolution ever advisedly produced among us by any deliber- 
ate act of our Legislature. 

In the same spirit, Henry II., as we saw when we met last, 
attached the offices of treasurer-general and of controller-gen- 
eral to each of the sixteen generalities or fiscal districts into 
which Francis I. divided that part of France which was called 
the Pays d'Election. So far as appears, Henry's views were 
limited to the emolument to be derived from the sale of those 
offices ; but there seems no doubt that the creation of them 
materially increased the method and regularity with which 
the public accounts were kept and audited. 

I have already had occasion to explain the grounds on which 
I think that the invasion of the liberties, internal, judicial, and 
financial, of the Church of France, tended not to the increase, 
but to the destruction of the political liberties of the kingdom. 
I might at first sight, therefore, appear bound to add to the cat- 
alogue of the good works, or good designs of Henry II., his pe- 
cuniary dealings with the clergy of his realm. The concordat 
between Francis I. and Leo X. had authorized Francis to de- 
prive them of a large part of their ancient jurisdiction, inde- 
pendence, and patronage. Accordingly, in the year 1539, 'the 
chancellor, Gruillaume Poyet, framed an ordinance, which ac- 
quired from him the title of la Guillelmine, and which inflict- 
ed that disadvantage on the whole clerical order of France. 
Abandoned by the Pope, and at the mercy of the king, they 
proposed to repurchase their lost privileges at the enormous 
price of 3,000,000 of gold crowns according to one account, oi 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 391 

of livres according to another. Henry accepted the offer, and, 
after receiving as much money as the churchmen could raise 
by the sale of their plate, he proceeded, with their concurrence, 
to enact two ordinances. The first secured the balance due to 
him by an annual tax on every belfry in the kingdom. The 
second revoked the Guillelmine. Both ordinances were sent 
to the Parliament for registration. They accepted the first 
and rejected the second. Acquiescing in both of theu- decis- 
ions, Henry entered into possession of the belfry tax. It had 
been imposed as a security for raising 3,000,000 livres. It was 
continued in force until it had actually yielded him 12,000,000. 
But the Gfuillelmine was also continued in force ; and thus the 
Church of France was plundered, by the King of France, of 
12,000,000 of livres, without receiving any equivalent what- 
ever. 

The next of Henry's financial projects, if less promising, was 
also less dishonest. The accounts of the revenue officers at- 
tached to the army, the treasury, and the royal household were 
in arrear, and their balances had accumulated in their hands. 
To prevent the recurrence of such irregularities, Henry doubled 
the number of those offices. Each accountant was to serve 
only in the alternate years, and each, during his year of inac- 
tion, was to bring up the accounts of his year of active service. 
Such was the avowed motive and apology for the change. The 
real motive was, that it enabled Henry to put up to sale as 
many offices in all these departments as he had found estab- 
lished there. 

The last of his financial devices is, at first sight, not only 
blameless, but commendable. It consisted in imposing duties 
of import in cases where, till then, duties of export only had 
been Igvied. But ignorance and folly would not abdicate their 
established authority, even in doing an act which wisdom it- 
self recommended ; for many of the provinces of France itself 
were, for the purposes of this tax, placed on the footing of for- 
eign countries ; and the import duties thus in effect became 
prohibitions of intercourse between the different districts of 
the same state, to the extreme prejudice of the trade and pros- 
perity of them all. 

In the reign of Francis, the successor of Henry, the melan- 
choly art or science of taxation altogether languished. For the 



392 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

first and last time it was tlien numbered among the artes per- 
ditce. Yet sucli were tlie wants of his treasury, and such the 
sufferings of his people, that, as we formerly saw, he was con- 
strained to adopt the remedy so hateful in royal eyes, of con- 
vening the States-G-eneral after they had fallen into disuse, if 
not into oblivion, during a period of more than seventy years. 
They were accordingly convoked in the city of Blois, and were 
holden there, though not by him, but by his brother and suc- 
cessor, Charles IX. Of that meeting, and of the second con- 
vention of the States in the same city under Henry III., I have 
already offered such an account as I have thought it necessary, 
or rather as I have found it possible, within these narrow lim- 
its of time, to lay before you. Passing over, therefore, the sub- 
ject of those assemblies for the present, I observe that, as a 
financier, Charles is chiefly memorable for two innovations : 

First, he established, with impartial injustice, taxes paya- 
ble to the crown by all suitors for redress m the judicial tri- 
bunals ; a subject on which, indeed, an English commentator 
on the fiscal laws of our neighbors must moderate his zeal and 
temper his invective ; for the youngest of my audience is old 
enough to remember the time when, despite our ancient boasts 
and hereditary reverence for the G-reat Charter, similar im- 
posts were levied on all suitors in Westminster Hall. 

But, secondly, if we have imitated Charles in his first ex- 
ample of exacting contributions from the distressed in the mo- 
m.ent of their difficulties, we have not yet copied his second 
example, of striking at the prosperous in the hour of their tri- 
umph. That blow was aimed at the public accountants. It 
was judged, and probably it was rightly judged, that they had 
all fattened on ill-gotten gains. To have tried and punished 
them would have been praiseworthy. To have imposed on 
them heavy mulcts might have been not unreasonable ; but 
to subject them to a large future annual impost (the method 
actually taken) was but indirectly to authorize their future 
extortions, on the tacit understanding that, by means of the 
new tax to which they were subjected, the king himself was 
to participate in the plunder. 

Difficult as it is to find any subject for eulogy in the disas- 
trous reign of his successor, Henry III., we may safely applaud 
two of the three additions which he made to the burdens of 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 393 

his people. The first was a tax on the retailers of spirituous 
liquors ; the second, a tax on all appointments to public offices. 
The profits both of the vintner and of the employe may well 
have admitted, and may often have demanded, such a reduc- 
tion. But the maitrise, or tax on admission into any trade, 
was, in eflfect, the creation of a monopoly. The purchasers of 
such licenses therefore regarded the price paid for them, not 
with patience merely, but with complacency and favor. It 
protected them against the competition of all traders who could 
not afibrd to make similar payments, and who were, therefore, 
prevented from passing from the condition of apprentices into 
that of masters. 

I gladly emerge from these wearisome details, and from the 
dark era to which they relate, into brighter times and more 
interesting topics. 

When the house of Valois had become extinct, and Paris 
had at length submitted to Henry IV., the miseries of France 
had reached a height far exceeding even that of the woes by 
which it was visited two centuries afterward, during the agony 
of the great revolution. The victims of the religious wars had 
not been much, if at all, less than a million souls. Nine great 
cities had been demolished. Two hundred and fifty villages 
had been burned. The number of houses destroyed was cal- 
culated at 128,000. Commerce, manufactures, and even agri- 
culture had been abandoned through extensive districts, and 
were languishing in all. The single branch of industry which 
flourished was that of the tax-gatherer. The single class of 
people who lived in abundance were the great lords and chat- 
elains, who, with their armed followers, wrung the means of 
subsistence from the terrified and half-starved peasantry. 

From the letters of Henry himself, we may best gather what 
was at this time the distress of the royal treasury. " I have," 
he says, " neither a horse to ride, nor a saddle and bridle to 
put on him if I had. All my shirts are in rags, and all my 
doublets out at elbows. My kettle is often empty, and on the 
last two days I have been dining with one and another as I 
could, for my purveyors say that I have nothing to put on my 
table." From the Memoirs of Sully, and from the work of his 
contemporary Fromenteau, might be drawn a vivid picture of 
the fuianoial embarrassments amid which the fhst of the Bour- 



394 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

bons ascended tlie throne of his ancestors. The national debt 
amounted to 345,000,000 of the livres of that age, or to about 
15,000,000 of pounds sterling, of which a large part bore in- 
terest at the rate of 12 per cent, per annum. The gross amount 
of the taxes annually collected was 170,000,000. The annual 
net receipt of the treasury was only 30,000,000, of which 
19,000,000 were absorbed for the interest of the debt. Thus 
of each 170 livres which the people paid, the proportion actu- 
ally applied to the service of the state was only 11 livres. 

Henry first attempted to remedy these evils by appointing 
a revenue board of eight officers. The following is his own 
account of the result of that experiment : " Instead of one gor- 
mandizer, whom I had before, I have helped myself to eight. 
These rogues, and the swarm of subordinates whom they have 
brought after them, manage, by one trick and another, to eat 
up the whole hog. They have already made away with 100,000 
crowns, with which I could have driven the Spaniards out of 
France." 

Sully then came to his master's aid. Our chancellors of the 
exchequer, laborious as they may be, never dream of such toils 
as fell to his lot. His sword was as necessary to him as his 
pen, for he had to challenge to mortal combat, or accept the 
challenges of the noble antagonists of his economical reforms. 
His stud of thorough-bred horses were his most effective sub- 
alterns, for he had to gallop from one end of France to the 
other to detect abuses and to fill his treasure wagons. The 
passages of his house were blocked up with bags of silver and 
with suitors for a share of it, until, with rough words and still 
rougher blows, he had defended the coin and beaten back the 
suitors. The gallant baron also, when occasion required it, 
had to be as expert as the best disciple of Loyola in pious 
frauds, to circumvent the knaves who were attempting to cir- 
cumvent him ; as, for example, when he lamented to some 
revenue officers his irreparable loss of a long series of vouch- 
ers, which, however, he triumphantly exhibited to them as soon 
as, in the belief of his statement, they had sufficiently falsified 
their accounts and exposed their knavery. 

The tone in which the great financier chuckles over his ad- 
dress in baffling rogues at their own weapons is, however, more 
pardonable than his exultation in the ruse which he played off 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 395 

on the Assembly of Notables at Rouen, whom Henry had con- 
vened to aid him with their advice as to the improvement of 
his finances. They proposed that a committee of their own 
body should take on them the administration of half of the 
royal revenue, leaving the other half to be administered by the 
king. Sully states himself to have warmly and successfully 
advised the acceptance of this proposal. But the sagacious 
minister took care, as he informs us, so to divide the revenue 
as to reserve to himself the productive and least unpopular 
sources of it, assigning to the more ignorant committee the 
proceeds of all the taxes which were most unpopular and least 
profitable. He tells, with infinite glee, how distinctly he fore- 
saw the inevitable result, and with what pleasure he witnessed 
it ; how the committee, bewildered, harassed, and fatigued, fell 
into disgrace with the people, and became disgusted with their 
undertaking ; how he, on the contrary, sustained triumphantly 
his share of the burden which he had so ingeniously divided 
between his shoulders and theirs ; and how gladly they at 
length abdicated their ungracious office, leaving him without 
a rival in the administration of the finances of France. 

They could scarcely have been transferred into hands more 
worthy of such a trust. His character was not, indeed, cast 
in a very sublime mold. It was composed of none of those 
qualities which we ardently love or passionately admire. He 
rose to the eminent station he fills in history by homely vir- 
tues, which might seem to be within the reach of most men — 
by calm self-possession — by a courage which nothing could 
daunt — by an industry which nothing could fatigue — by a 
perseverance from which caprice never diverted him — by a 
heart-loyalty to the king he served — by an honest zeal for the 
welfare of his country, and by an habitual sympathy with the 
weak and the oppressed. Yet there was not a spark of enthu- 
siasm in his nature. Neither the gayety of youth nor the ex- 
perience of old age could ever withdraw him from the path, 
however irksome or invidioiSs, by which his own wealth and 
greatness might be best secured. He first introduces himself 
to us in his Memoirs in the character of an amateur horse- 
dealer in the camp of Henry, and he takes his leave of us in 
possession of dignities which might have satiated the ambition 
'*of a Guise, and of wealth which might have quenched the cu- 



396 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

piclity of a Law. His Protestantism seems to have been little 
more than a domestic tradirtion, a party badge, and a point of 
honor. But if Sully did not live in very high latitudes of 
thought or sentiment, he lived under the guidance of clear good 
sense and of many honest instincts. He could never have been 
the founder of a school of wisdom, or of any independent do- 
minion, political, military, or intellectual ; but he has be- 
queathed to the wise an example from which they may draw 
many a useful lesson for the successful conduct of life in the 
highest and most arduous of all subordinate secular employ- 
ments. 

Sully and his m.aster quitted together the war which they 
had so long waged against the Catholics, to fight side by side 
against the jobbers, impostors, usurers, and depredators of 
their age. His " Economies Royales," and " Le Secret des 
Finances" by Fromenteau, exhibit the whole plan and conduct 
of those later campaigns. The following brief epitome of them 
may be enough to stimulate your curiosity to consult those 
originals. 

The financial career of Sully began, it must be confessed, 
with an imitation of the worst examples of the worst of his 
predecessors. He increased the public debt, he raised the salt 
duties, he extorted a forced loan from the public accountants, 
and he created and sold many public offices. But the folly 
of one period is often the wisdom of another. Wretched as 
these resources were, none other could immediately be found 
to rescue Paris from the danger, and France from the invasion, 
which the surrender of Amiens to the arms of Spain portended. 
To meet that alarming crisis, political economy, and all other 
economies, were most judiciously given to the winds. But 
the Treaty of Vervins, which restored peace to Europe, re- 
stored also to Sully the means of acting on more enlarged and 
permanent principles. 

The first of those principles was, in his own words, that the 
land, and the labor bestowed on Uie land, sont les deux mam- 
elles de Vctat. His inferences from this doctrine were, first, 
that agriculture should be relieved, to the utmost possible ex- 
tent, from all fiscal burdens ; and, secondly, that the expendi- 
ture of the state should, as far as possible, be thrown on the 
non-agricviltural classes of society. 



POAVER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 397 

Pursuing this theory to its practical consequences, Sully 
remitted to the landholders arrears of tallies amounting to 
20,000,000 of livres. He reduced the tallies for future years 
to two thirds of their former amount. He exempted all the 
instruments, animate or inanimate, of agricultural labor, from 
the liahility to seizure for debt. He discharged the cultivators 
of the soil from the burden of maintaining the king's troops ei- 
ther on their march or in their quarters. He prohibited all 
local taxation by the governors of provinces or by the lords of 
seigneuries ; and he abolished all duties on agricultural prod- 
uce when sold in the public markets. The cry of agricultural 
distress has seldom been met with a response so cordial. 

To remit taxes is, however, an easy and a grateful task. To 
combine this hazardous luxury with a just regard for the pub- 
lic service, and a conscientious respect for the public credit, is 
the crucial test of a minister of finance. It is a test by which 
Sully may be tried and not be found wanting. I find no less 
than five great measures of economy by which he justified his 
remission of duties. 

First. He suppressed every superfluous office of emolument, 
beginning with those which he had himself created and sold. 
But these reductions were invariably made with a cautious 
regard to the public faith which had been pledged to the pur- 
chasers. 

Secondly. He effected a saving of 600,000 crowns per an- 
num by paying directly from the public treasury the interest 
of a debt for which certain specific revenues had been mort- 
gaged. The creditors had, till then, been in receipt of the 
mortgaged revenues, and had, of course, discovered that the 
costs of the collection swallowed up whatever remained after 
the discharge of their own annual interest. 

Thirdly. Sully, in the same manner, enforced the restitu- 
tion to the crown of crown estates of vast value, which he 
found in possession of public creditors, as a security for the 
loans advanced on the mortgage of them ; but, at the same 
time, he repaid, by means of a temporary loan, the whole of 
the principal sums which were really due on that security. 

Fourthly. He expunged from what was called the Great 
Book of France public debts amounting to 6,000,000 of livres 
per annum. A " commission of inquiry" (I have more than 



398 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

once had occasion to remind you that there is no new thing 
under the sun) enabled him to effect this operation, by prov- 
ing that many of the public creditors held under invalid titles, 
or had been inscribed as creditors against the public for valu- 
able considerations which had been nominally, and not really, 
paid. 

Fifthly. The same inexorable avenger of frauds doubled 
the receipt of the treasury from the farms of the customs and 
salt tax, by setting up those farms to auction, after having 
first distinctly ascertained that the existing leases had been 
obtained by false representations of the real produce of those 
branches of revenue. 

To these measures of economy is to be added the imposition 
of a solitary tax to sustain the public credit and expenditure. 
It borrowed the name of La Paulette from Charles Paulet, the 
projector of it. At that time public offices had become do- 
mestic inheritances. The evil was as irremediable as it was 
grievous. Paulet therefore proposed to impose a tax upon all 
public offices, amounting to one sixtieth part of their annual 
emoluments. It was an impost welcome to the office-holders 
themselves, as it secured the permanency of their titles. It 
was welcome to Sully and to the public as being a kind of 
salvage, where the wreck and loss would otherwise have been 
total. 

It remains to mention the last of Sully's financial measures. 
It consisted, first, in devising a new system of rendering and 
keeping the public accounts as a security against the frauds 
which had, till then, found shelter under the ancient confused 
and irregular system of accounting. It consisted, secondly, in 
establishing the all-important rule (which to this hour is not 
in full force among ourselves) that no public money should be 
issued by any collector of it except in pursuance of a royal 
ordinance. But here he paused. It was one of the errors of 
this great man to despise commercial interests, and one of his 
infirmities to dislike commercial men. When, therefore, a 
great merchant of Bruges, Simon Stephen by name, interpret- 
ed to him the counting-house mystery of double entry, and 
advised him to adopt it into the financial accounts of France, 
Sully rejected, with ignorant contempt, the best possible se- 
curity against the frauds with which he was warring. 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 399 

Suoli are the operations on which the financial fame of Snlly 
depends. They attest his courage, constancy, and vigorous un- 
derstanding, but they do not indicate any profound insight 
into the principles of political government and political econ- 
omy. Such studies were, indeed, foreign alike to the man 
and to his generation. So defective was he in these sciences, 
that he even increased those transit dues, which placed the ad- 
jacent provinces of France in the same mercantile relation to 
each other as to foreign countries ; extending, for example, the 
customs duties on goods borne across the Loire to many arti- 
cles till then exempt from them ; exactmg a tribute on all 
merchandise entering or quitting the city of Lyons ; and re- 
quiring that all goods sent from that city to distant markets 
should be carried either through Yienne or St. Colombe (how- 
ever great the deviation), because in those two places, and 
there alone, were stationed collectors of the export duties. It 
is with still greater surprise that we read that Sully was the 
single opponent of the proposal for retaliating against the ships 
of foreign nations in French ports the heavy charges to which 
French ships were subject in the ports of any such nation ; 
that we find him resisting the introduction of Dutch and Flem- 
ish artisans to teach, in France, the arts which had enriched 
their own countries ; and that we learn that he discouraged 
both the growth of mulberry trees and the manufacture of 
silks, brocades, and satins, because the tendency of such arts 
was to foster an enervating luxury. 

The influx of precious metals from South America had, in 
his age, so augmented the price of all articles of general con- 
sumption, that the royal revenue became continually less and 
less adequate to sustain the charges to which it was liable. 
Sully had recourse to many remedies to arrest this unwelcome 
change in the value of money. At one time he altered the 
money of account. At another he forbade the importation of 
foreign coins. Then he prohibited the export of specie, and 
finally he raised the nominal value of all the gold and silver 
coins current in France. It is needless to say that he labored 
in vain. The world had yet to learn that gold and silver, 
whether with or without the impress of a national mint, obey 
the same laws which regulate the prices and the interchange 
of all other merchantable articles. 



400 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 

"We must admit, therefore, that Sully was ignorant of many 
economical truths with which the striplings of our own times 
are familiar, but he understood the great science of elevating 
a ruined people into a prosperous nation. Under the house of 
Valois, France had been plunged into what might have seem- 
ed an abyss of irreparable calamities ; under the administra- 
tion of Sully it was restored to peace, to order, and to wealth. 
He found the revenue overwhelmed with debt ; he not only left 
it unencumbered, but amassed a vast treasure for the defense 
of the nation or for foreign conquest. He found the French 
liable to annual taxes amounting to 30,000,000 ; but he re- 
duced that amount to 26,000,000 per annum. He found the 
royal palaces in decay ; he restored them to splendor. He 
found the fortresses of the kingdom dilapidated ; he renewed 
their strength and increased their number. Churches, hos- 
pitals, and other public edifices arose on every side. The 
highways and bridges were repaired. The Pont Neuf, the 
quays of Paris, and some of the principal streets of that city, 
attest, at this hour, the grandeur to which the parsimony and 
thrift of the real ruler of France, in the reign of the first of the 
Bourbons, were subservient. The royal arsenals were filled 
with munitions of war. A navy was rising in the French 
dock-yards. A vast system of internal navigation was in prog- 
ress for connecting the Seine with the Loire,, the Loire with 
the Saone, and the Saone with the Meuse ; and rewards, be- 
coming the dignity of the King of France, were bestowed on 
all who had attained to eminence in art, or science, or in the 
public service. If Henry's celebrated wish, that the poorest 
peasant in his kingdom might eat meat every week-day, and 
have a chicken in his pot for his Sunday's dinner, was not ex- 
actly fulfilled, yet no slight advance had been made toward the 
fulfillment of it. In his reign the cultivators of the soil were 
rescued from many of the worst tyrannies of the noblesse, of 
the soldiery, and of the tax-gatherers. Every man planted in 
quiet and reaped in safety. The artisan received the hire of 
his labor. The merchant gathered in the profits of his capital. 
Astrsea had not, indeed, revisited the land ; but the irbn age 
of war, and famine, and fiscal oppression had passed away. Re- 
lieved of the burdens beneath which they had so long groaned, 
the French people sprang forward in the path of improvement 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE, 401 

with a youthful elasticity of spirit, indicating that all tlie no- 
bler organs of social life in France still retained their healthful 
tone and their unimpaired vitality. 

And yet neither Henry nor his great minister restored to 
their nation any security against the recurrence of the abuses 
which they had so arrested. In later times those evils reap- 
peared, if not with equal intensity, yet in a character sub- 
stantially the same. Two centuries were yet to pass without 
a serious effort to introduce constitutional freedom ; nor could 
the power of the purse, which, in theory at least, still belong- 
ed to the representatives of the French people, yield that its 
legitimate fruit throughout the whole of that protracted pe- 
riod. 

I proposed at the outset to inquire, What was the true cause 
of the failure of a hope which the experience of other nations 
might teach us to regard as so reasonable ? Throughout the 
preceding details, and in my former lecture on the Sources and 
Management of the Finances of France, I have attempted to 
prepare the way for what I suppose to be the true solution of 
that problem. 

First, then, the principle that the people could not be law- 
fully taxed except by their own consent, given by their own 
representatives, was at all times recognized much more as a 
theory with which to polish rhetorical periods, than as a prac- 
tical rule for the government of the different members of the 
state. The substitution of splendid phrases for plain sense and 
for practical measures is one of the inveterate maladies of the 
national mind of France. 

Secondly. As I attempted to show in a former lecture, this 
principle was barren of its proper fruits, because the repre- 
sentatives of the French people were not summoned except in 
extreme exigencies ; because, when summoned, they were con- 
tent to remonstrate and petition, instead of insisting on their 
right to legislate and to act ; and because they failed in the 
skill now to yield and now to resist, at the right time and in 
the right measure. Or, more briefly, all the reasons which, as 
we have formerly seen, rendered the States-G-eneral incompe- 
tent to their other functions, rendered them also unfit to wield 
the power of the purse as a weapon of constitutional liberty. 

Thirdly. The assumption by the kings of France of the 

C c 



/ 



402 POWER OF THE PURSE IN PRANCE. 

legislative power was fatal to the popular power of tlie purse ; 
for although the recognized theory still refused to the king the 
right to make a revenue law, yet the distinction between the 
different classes of enactments was not easily drawn hy the 
most upright sovereigns, and was very easily obliterated by 
all the rest. 

Fourthly. The assumption by the Parliaments of the right 
to an effective veto on the royal enactments had a direct and 
powerful tendency to render the popular power of the purse 
sterile of constitutional freedom ; for, in consequence of that 
assumption, the Parliaments combined their judicial powers 
with a share in the legislative authority. When, therefore, 
they had assented to a law as legislators, they were at once 
able and bound to give effect to it as judges. And that assent 
Was, in fact, easily obtained even to a royal ordinance, which 
illegally imposed new and unconstitutional tributes on the peo- 
ple at large ^ for as the Parliaments comprised no representa- 
tive or popular element in their composition, they were seldom 
either well disposed or well able to oppose more than a faint 
and irresolute resistance to the royal will ; and their resist- 
ance, even when most resolute, could be imperiously overruled 
at a lit de justice. 

Fifthly. The want of a really independent system of judi- 
cature deprived the people of France of any means of arresting 
the assumption by the crown of any fiscal prerogatives to wliich 
it from time to time laid claim, though such claims were often 
invalid, and were not seldom destitute of any foundation what- 
ever. 

Sixthly. Those royal prerogatives, especially in whatever 
related to trade, whether internal or external, were so vast as 
always to rescue the kings of France from much of the de- 
pendence on the good will of their people, into which they 
might otherwise have been brought, and as usually to afford 
them the ready means of corruption by a patronage which, at 
the moment, might seem to cost themselves nothing. 

Seventhly. The wars with England, the Italian wars, the 
rivalry with the house of Austria, and the wars of religion, 
wliich, from 1837 to 1598, that is, during more than 260 years, 
subjected France to such calamities and such waste of treasure 
as no other European state has ever had to sustain, while they 



POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 403 

proved the marvelous extent and elasticity of her resources, 
proved also a fatal obstacle, or rather a succession of fatal ob- 
stacles, not only to economy in the management of the public 
revenue, but also to any use of the power of the purse as a 
counterpoise to the powers of the sceptre and of the sword. 

Eighthly. The establishment of a standing army under 
Charles YII., and the permanent appropriation to its support 
of the* seignorial failles, were among the disastrous results of 
those wars, and enervated all the efforts by which, from that 
time forward, the popular party ever sought to restrain the au- 
thority of the king and to assert their own. The taille, though 
charged by the States-Greneral of Charles with an annual lia- 
bility of 1,200,000 livres only for this purpose, became virtu- 
ally liable for it to an indefinite extent. 

Ninthly. The exemption of the privileged classes from the 
tallies, and from some other of the more oppressive taxes, by 
destroying all community of interest between the different 
ranks of contributors to the public treasury, prevented their 
ever adopting any decisive and unanimous measures to arrest 
the bursal encroachments of the crown upon the people. Or, 
rather, the crown could hardly make any such encroachment 
without finding active allies in one or more of the orders of the 
state. 

Tenthly. The isolation of the Clergy from the Nobles and 
the Tiers Etat in whatever related to taxation, was a privilege 
which the Church possessed and boasted at the expense of the 
secular interests of her own members, and of the common- 
wealth at large. Her gratuitous gifts were gratuitous only in 
name ; but they enabled the king first to disregard, and then 
to overrule, the more prudent resistance of his secular subjects 
to his most exorbitant demands upon them. 

Eleventhly. The right, or supposed right, of the crown to 
anticipate the royal revenue by loans made without the con- 
sent of the States-General, or even of the Parliaments, was 
among the most habitual and the most fatal of the causes of 
the impotency of those bodies to oppose any effectual obstacle 
to the expenditure and to the financial independence of their 
sovereigns. 

Twelfthly. The ill conduct and ill success of the popular 
insurrections by which, at different times, the people attempt- 



404 THE REFORMATION AND 

ed to fetter the hands of then* wasteful monarchs, not only 
counteracted the designs of the insurgents, but strengthened 
the power which they had so fruitlessly endeavored to coerce, 

Thirteenthly. When, occasionally, fiscal reforms were ex- 
torted from the crown, they were invariably destitute of any 
effectual guarantee for the faithful observance of the conces- 
sions so made to the public voice. To such disappointments 
succeeded disgust and indifference, if not despondency, among 
the most zealous reformers. 

Fourteenthly. The same results were induced by the want 
of any effective plan of rendering and auditing the accounts 
of the kingdom. The abuse of the acquits de comptant was 
itself enough to baffle every attempt to bring the government 
into any due subordination to the people in the use of the funds 
raised for the civil and military service of the kingdom. 

Finally, as I shall attempt to show in future lectures, pub- 
lic opinion, as expressed by the most eminent of the French 
authors, did nothing and attempted nothing to strengthen the 
foundations or to explain the importance of the great consti- 
tutional doctrine of the French monarchy. 

I have thus endeavored to compress into the shortest possi- 
ble compass my answers to the problem with which I com- 
menced the present lecture. Your own study of French his- 
tory will, I trust, enable you both to appreciate the accuracy 
of those answers and to multiply their number. 



LECTURE XV. 

ON THE REFORMATION AND THE WARS OF RELIGION. 

To have emancipated the human mind from the errors of 
Papal Rome is but one of the many triumphs of the Reforma- 
tion. In almost every part of the Christian world, that great 
religious enfranchisement was followed by civil liberty, as at 
once its offspring and its guardian. But in France it was oth- 
erwise ; and I proceed to inquire how it happened that the pro- 
test made by so large a part of the French people against the 
tyranny of the Roman Church was not followed by any effect- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 405 

ual resistance to the despotism of the reigning dynasty. To 
render the answer to that question intelligible, it is necessary 
that I should indicate some of the principal steps of the prog- 
ress of the Reformation in that kingdom ; and, if that preface 
should appear disproportionately long, I would hespeak your 
mdulgence till it shall appear what are the uses to which it 
is to be at length applied. 

For the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century has 
been claimed a spiritual lineage, ascending, in unbroken suc- 
cession, through the Moravians, the disciples of Huss and of 
Wickliffe, the Albigenses, and the Paulicians, until it reach- 
es the prunitive ages of Christianity. For another race of 
Reformers has been traced a different genealogy, ascending 
through Savonarola, G-erson, D'Ailly, and Bernard of Clair- 
vaux, until it reaches the Fathers of many ancient synods, 
who clung with passionate fondness to the Church which they 
endeavored at once to purify and to maintain. To subdue the 
fhst of these generations of men by terror, and the second by 
blandishments, had, during many ages, been the office of the 
Papacy, when a new and irresistible .power interposed as the 
arbiter in that protracted strife. The human mind, aroused 
from the slumber of centuries, announced, in ten thousand dif- 
ferent but concurring voices, that the dominion of ignorance 
and of superstition was drawing to a close. Luther made that 
proclamation to the potentates assembled at Worms in the year 
1521 ; and, in the same year, the doctrines of Luther were, 
for the first time, publicly announced in France. The city of 
Meaux, which was destined to become, in a future age, the 
episcopal seat of the greatest of all the opponents of the Ref- 
ormation, enjoyed, at that time, the nobler distinction of be- 
coming the cradle of the Reformed faith in the French mon- 
archy. 

Of that faith James Lefevre and "William Farel were the 
earliest confessors. Lefevre had nearly completed his seven- 
tieth year, Farel had not quite attained the age of twenty- 
four. Each of them had derived his new opinions from the 
study of the Scriptures, and they lived together m the inter- 
change of that touching affection which occasionally unites the 
aged and the young. The contemplative spirit of the old man 
and the fervor of his youthful associate were blended together 



406 THE REFORMATION AND 

in harmonious concert and mutual co-operation. Nor were 
they long dependent only on each other's aid. They found at 
once a patron and a fellow-laborer in William Briqonnet, the 
bishop of the diocese. He assisted them in publishing a trans- 
lation of the Evangelists, and in preaching the Evangelical doc- 
trines. Nor did they preach in vain. So extensive and so last- 
ing was their influence, that, throughout the first half of the 
sixteenth century, a "heretic of Meaux" became the popular 
name in France for an antagonist of the See of Rome, 

But against such heretics the voice of the Sorbonne was 
raised with a resentment whetted by the keen sense of some 
galling indignities. They had lately published a decree in 
which Luther was compared to Mohammed ; and Melancthon 
had derided it as "the wild production of certain Parisian The- 
ologasters, of doctors under whose guidance it was the ill for- 
tune of France to be placed." Such doctors were not, how- 
ever, to be laughed at with impunity. They cited Bishop Bri- 
9onnet before the Parliament of Paris, and extorted from him 
a humiliating retraction of his imputed errors. John le Clerc, 
another of the heretics of Meaux, became, on this occasion, the 
protomartyr of the Reformation in France. Farel fled into 
Dauphine, where he preached in the dry beds of winter tor- 
rents, or in the mountain fastnesses, until he was compelled 
to seek refuge in Basle. Lefevre escaped to Nerac, there to 
close his long life under the protection of Marguerite of Valois. 

That lady holds an eminent place in the history both of the 
literature and of the reformation of her native land. Every 
one will, indeed, gladly cherish the disbelief of her authorship 
of the collection of Tales for which she is celebrated, for they 
egregiously violate the delicacy of her sex and the decencies 
of society. Or, if the evidence on which they are ascribed to 
her pen should be thought irresistible, let us not refuse to her 
memory the excuse afforded by the manners of her times, nor 
forget how nobly the fault was repaired by the sanctity of her 
later writings, and by her generous protection of all who in her 
days were persecuted for conscience sake. 

She was the only sister and the cherished friend of Francis 
I. ; but it is diflicult to say to which of the conflicting creeds 
of their generation either of them was really attached. Fran- 
cis, indeed, was a worshiper of the idol " G-lory." He sought 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 407 

to propitiate that capricious power by many costly offerings — 
"by eclipsing the achievements of Charles Y. — by rivaling the 
splendor of Henry VIII. — by combining all the majesty of the 
first of European kings with all the gallantry of the first of Eu- 
ropean gentlemen — and by a munificent patronage of letters 
and of art. Yet le Roi Chevalier was rather a great actor than 
a great agent in the affairs of the world. His principles of 
conduct were continually overborne by the gusts of his trans- 
itory passions ; and, both in the religious and the political con- 
troversies of his times, he changed his position and his alliances 
with the promptitude and the fickleness characteristic of all 
such unruly emotions. Marguerite, on the contrary, although 
her own personal belief seems to the last to have been unset- 
tled, was inflexible in her zeal for the defense of the persons 
and the doctrines of the Reformers. Sometimes her influence 
with Francis arrested his severities toward them, and some- 
times his influence with her prevented her acceptance of their 
opinions. Many years of their lives were passed in this affec- 
tionate contest, which seems to have cemented, instead of di- 
minishing, the love which they bore to each other. Ill fared 
it with any who, presuming on the superstitious weaknesses 
of either, dared to bring that affiection to any hazardous test. 
Thus Marguerite, having introduced sundry Reformed preach- 
ers into the pulpits of Paris, the whole clerical body. of the city 
revenged themselves against her for the insult. At the Col- 
lege of Navarre, the monks exhibited a play, in which she un- 
derwent a metamorphosis from a student of the Bible into a 
daemon enveloped in flames. The more serious Sorbonne pro- 
mulgated a decree censuring her writings as heretical ; and a 
Cordelier had the hardihood to recommend that she should be 
tied up in a sack and thrown into the Seine. Monks, doctors, 
and Cordeliers were instantly sentenced by the indignant king 
to humiliating punishments ; though scarcely had his wrath 
been appeased by their sufferings, when his passions veered 
round to the precisely opposite quarter. 

The day-dream of the life of Francis was the conquest of the 
Milanese. An alliance with the Tuscan and the Papal courts 
appeared to promise the fulfillment of that hope ; and such an 
alliance might, as it then seemed, be cemented by the marri- 
age of Henry, the eldest son of Francis, to Catharine of Medici, 



408 THE REFORMATION AND 

the niece of Clement VII. That pope having arrived in per- 
son at Marseilles, Francis therefore hastened thither to con- 
clude with him this double compact, nuptial and political ; and 
then, animated with a new zeal for the Papacy, he returned to 
Paris to gratify the unfortunate monks, doctors, and Cordeliers , 
by silencing their opponents and dispersing their flocks. The 
Reformers did not endure these wrongs with their accustomed 
equanimity. In an evil moment they covered the walls of 
Paris, and even the door of the royal chamber, with placards 
containing unmeasured invectives against the mass, and the 
other observances and doctrines peculiar to their antagonists. 
Such an outrage on his religion and his person kindled an un- 
quenchable fury in the soul of Francis, who commanded the 
immediate seizure and persecution of all the heretics ; and 
either arranged, or assented to a religious procession, which was 
designed to enhance the solemnity of his proceedings against 
them. 

In most countries fetes are hut the idle pastimes of an idle 
day. In France it is often otherwise. The Fete of Paris of 
the 29th of January, 1535, was as momentous in its results as 
it was imposing in its ceremonial. In the midst of a count- 
less assemblage, thronging every street and house-top, appeared 
the king, preceded by all the sacred relics of his capital, and 
by all the ecclesiastical dignitaries who bore them, and fol- 
lowed by the princes of his blood, and by the various counsel- 
ors and courts, guilds and companies of the city. Mass had 
"been sung, and a royal banquet had been served, when, ascend- 
ing his throne in the presence of his people, Francis solemnly 
announced his resolution to punish all heresy with death, and 
not to spare even his own children if they should be guilty of 
it. " Nay," he exclaimed, as he raised aloft his arm, " if this 
hand were infected with that disease, this other hand should 
chop it off." Such words, from such a speaker, were not ad- 
dressed in vain to such an audience. I advance reluctantly to 
the close of the narrative. The festivities of the day were 
ended by suspending six heretics from as many beams, which 
turned horizontally on a pivot in such a manner that the revo- 
lutions of each beam brought the sufferers, one after another, 
over a furnace, into which they were successively plunged, 
until, by repeated immersions in that bath of fire, they were 



THE AVARS OF RELIGION. 409 

all at length destroyed. On that hideous spectacle Francis 
himself deliberately gazed. The people of Paris, maddened hy 
this taste of blood, gave way to a ferocity which, during five 
successive reigns, scarcely ever ceased to offer new victims to 
Moloch in the name of the Prince of Peace. From this era, 
their fierce and unrelenting hostility to the Reformers takes its 
commencement. The fanaticism which was then aroused was 
satiated, at the distance of twenty-seven years, by the massacre 
of St. Bartholomew. 

But, notwithstanding his domestic and political alliance with 
the Pope, Francis had concluded with the Protestant League 
at Smalcalde another confederacy, of which the object was the 
depression of the house of Austria. The intelligence of the 
persecutions of their brethren at Paris excited the liveliest re- 
sentment among the members of that league ; and they indig- 
nantly intimated to Francis their purpose of making common 
cause with the emperor against himself, as the deadliest enemy 
of the faith of the Reformers. To avert the displeasure of his 
Grerman allies, Francis made concessions, promises, and apolo- 
gies. He assured them that the victims of the Fete of Janu- 
ary, 1535, had been punished, not for their religion, but for 
their offenses against the state ; and, availing himself of the 
ever ready weapon supplied by the disunion of the Reformers, 
he added the assurance that they were not Lutherans, but 
Sacramentarians. 

This defense of the recent atrocities of Paris was read at 
Basle by John Calvin. To defend his persecuted brethren 
against the calumnies of their persecutors, he published, in Au- 
gust, 1535, his Christian Institutes. It announced to the world 
that the Reformation in France had at length found a leader 
and a head. 

At the age of twelve (such were the habits of the times) 
Calvin had received the presentation of an ecclesiastical bene- 
fice ; but, by the diligent study of the Bible, he became a zeal- 
ous adherent and teacher of the Reformed faith before he had 
completed twice that number of years. Having been com- 
pelled, by the doctors of the Sorbonne, to fly for his life from 
Paris, he taught the G-ospel in Poitou ; and there may yet be 
seen near Poitiers a cave, bearing his name, in commemoration 
of his having been accustomed to celebrate divine worship 



410 THE REFORMATION AND 

within its dark recesses. Driven from this and every other 
place of refuge in France, he at length found shelter at Basle. 

In a future lecture I shall have occasion to discuss the lit- 
erary merits of the great work which he published in that city. 
The religious influence which attended it is incalculahle. It 
was received by the whole body of the Protestants in France 
as the standard around which they might all rally. It ascer- 
tained their doctrine, determined their discipline, and regulated 
their ecclesiastical organization. 

Within a year from the appearance of his Institutes, Calvin^ 
was nominated to be a minister of the G-ospel at Geneva, and 
a professor of the college at that city. There he established, 
in his own person, a theocratic sovereignty ; while by his books, 
his letters, and his missionaries, he governed the Reformed 
churches in France. The heretics of Meaux now assumed the 
name of Calvinists. 

So vast were the literary, ministerial, and public labors of 
Calvin, that the history of them would appear altogether fab- 
ulous, if it did not rest partly on his existing works, and partly 
on the authority of his intimate friend and constant associa:te, 
Theodore Beza. It is a tale which reduces to a comparatively 
dwarfish stature the most imposing of the giants of intellectual 
industry, on whom we are accustomed to gaze with the live- 
liest admiration. His moral and religious character are free 
from any recorded stain except the execution of Servetus, on 
which subject, however, no one is entitled to pronounce a per- 
emptory judgment until he shall have read the elucidations of 
it, for which we are indebted to MM. Gruizot and Mignet, and 
which will be found under the head of " Calvin," in the Musee 
des Protestants oelebres. The faults of infirmities usually 
imputed to him are the love of pov/er, the impatience of con- 
tradiction, and a disposition irascible, severe, and reserved. 
As he says of himself that he was a naturel sauvage et lion- 
teux, I will not venture to undertake the defense of his temper 
against his own self-condemnation. But it is hardly a reason- 
able ground of censure that power should have been dear to a 
man who, by the immediate gift of the Creator himself, had 
been invested with so eminent and unapproachable a superior- 
ity over his fellow-men. Neither is it intelligible why any 
one who had devoted such an intellect as his to studies of such 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 411 

surpassing energy and perseverance, and who had derived from 
them such immutable convictions as he posseseed, should be 
blamed for a stern disregard of those garrulous gainsayers, to 
whom patience of thought was an unknown mental exercise, 
and in whose mouths freedom of thought was an empty and 
unmeaning boast. 

Judge, however, of Calvin as we may, it is impossible to 
deny him a place among the most illustrious of the conquerors 
whom history has recorded — of the conquerors whose weapons 
were intellectual only, and whose dommion had its seat in the 
minds of their own and of succeeding generations ; for in him 
the Protestants of France, of Switzerland, and of the seven 
United Provinces of Scotland, and of New England, with the 
Puritans, the Presbyterians, and the Independents of the other 
American states and of our own country, have ever recognized, 
or have been bound to recognize, their spiritual patriarch and 
ecclesiastical dictator. In the age in which he lived, such a 
dictatorship was indeed indispensable. If left without the 
guidance of some commanding intellect, the Huguenots of 
France could never (as far as mere human observation ex- 
tends) have maintained their inevitable contest with their 
secular and spiritual antagonists. 

It was a contest, not for toleration, but for existence. The 
ever versatile Francis had, indeed, occasionally assumed the 
office of protector of the Reformers in G-ermany, but he never 
failed recklessly to abandon it whenever such a change was 
required by his apparent interests. Thus his alliance with 
the confederates of Smalcalde was forgotten as soon as his new 
policy prompted that other alliance which, under the mediation 
of Paul III., he concluded with Charles V., for the extermina- 
tion of heresy throughout their respective dominions. And 
fearfully was that engagement fulfilled, when, in the year 
1545, the Baron Ompeda (emulous, as it might seem, of the 
infamy of Simon de Montfort), under the sanction, or, at least, 
the supposed sanction of Francis, massacred the last remnant 
of the Waldenses in Provence. The story of their sufferings 
is too shocking to be needlessly recited. It provoked a cry of 
indignation from one end of the kingdom to the other, for the 
religious wars had not as yet steeled the hearts of the French 
people to every sense of humanity. It agitated the dying mo- 



412 THE REFORMATION AND 

ments of Francis himself, who, maintaining that Ompeda had 
far exceeded his orders, bequeathed to his son, Henry II., with 
the crown of France, the duty of punishing that imputed trans- 
gression. 

Henry invoked in vain the sentence of the Parliament of 
Paris against Ompeda. But in his reign the Huguenots might 
hear with greater patience the impunity of their enemies, since 
they then rejoiced in a vast and unforeseen increase in the 
strength and number of their friends. It was the era of the 
highest prosperity of the Reformation in France. Many of the 
greatest provinces, and of the chief provincial capitals, became, 
in appearance, Protestant — a change to be chiefly ascribed to 
the profound conviction, then generally diffused throughout 
the land, of the truth of the new doctrines, but not to that 
cause exclusively ; for it is peculiar to the French Reforma- 
tion, and characteristic of it, that the converts from the old 
opinions were chiefly made, not among the poor and illiterate, 
but among the wealthy, the learned, and the great. Many 
secular motives concurred with higher impulses in recommend- 
ing to them such a change. The provincial nobles had long 
cherished a deep resentment against the sacerdotal order, as 
usurpers of their territorial rights and seignorial privileges. 
The judges and lawyers were jealous of the encroachments of 
the ecclesiastical on their own forensic authority. The mer- 
chants had discovered that there was, in the other parts of 
Europe, some mysterious link between the Protestant opinions 
and the prosperity of trade. The men of letters, whether lay 
or clerical, naturally turned their eyes to that quarter in which 
the range of speculative inquiry was enlarged, and the domin- 
ion of the human intellect extended. 

Thus neither authors, nor presses, nor money were wanting 
to the diffusion of the Calvinistic creed. United into one 
great secret society by a system of arbitrary signs, the Re- 
formers traversed the country secure of a hospitable shelter ; 
holding their assemblies in barns, or caves, or forest glades ; 
and disseminating books and pamphlets throughout the whole 
of France, under the cover of mercantile consignments or of 
peddler's packages, v^hile the ladies of the new faith increased 
its influence by exhibiting in their own persons a severe model 
of all the virtues of the female character. " I shall turn Hu- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 413 

guenot myself (exclaimed Catliarine of Medici, in one of her 
sportive moods), that I also may pass for a prude and a devote." 

Her husband Henry harbored no such fancies either in earn- 
est or in jest. He had completed his twenty-ninth year when 
he ascended the throne of France — an elevation which, if 
crowns were won by royal qualities alone, he never could have 
attained. He was formed to enjoy, and to diffuse around him 
the delights of society in its most brilliant and luxurious forms, 
and to shine among the foremost of the graceful, accomplish- 
ed, good humored, and indolent votaries of pleasure. In the 
dance or the tournament, as a carpet knight, he might have 
safely indulged his feeble dependence on friends and favorites. 
In the council chamber, as a king, he indulged it to the ruin 
of his kingdom. Abdicating to Anne de Montmorenci, to 
Francis, duke of Gruise, and to Diana of Poitiers, the real 
sovereignty of France, he laid the basis of those factions which, 
during the reigns of each of his sons, desolated the kingdom 
with misery and bloodshed. 

Of the wrongs and cruelties done upon our earth, how vast 
is the proportion for which easiness of temper is responsible ! 
Too obliging to refuse any thing to his mistress and his favor- 
ites, Henry II. gratified them by the first of that long series 
of iniquitous edicts against the Huguenots which deform the 
collection of the laws of the French kings. Enacted in 1551, 
and called the edict of Chateaubriant, it decreed that any one 
accused of heresy might be tried, in succession, both by the 
secular and by the spiritual courts ; that, if convicted by either, 
the oiTender should at once be executed, even pending his ap- 
peal from that conviction ; that no one should intercede for his 
pardon ; that a third of his estate should be the reward of the 
informer ; and that every one suspected of heresy should incur 
these penalties, unless he should, by sufficient evidence, prove 
that suspicion to be unfounded. It might have been supposed 
that the wickedness and folly of such a law could be surpassed 
only by the wickedness and folly with which it was carried 
into execution. But the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Sorbonne, 
and Pope Paul IV. meditated a yet lower depth of iniquity. 
In the name of that pontiff, but at their instance, appear^ in 
1557 a bull establishing the Inquisition in France. In the 
name of Henry, and at the instance of the same advisers, ap- 



414 THE REFORMATION AND 

peared a royal edict to carry that bull into execution. But 
there were yet some limits to the subserviency of the French 
people. The Parliament of Paris refused to register the edict, 
although the king himself in person commanded it. They were 
inflexibly firm, and he characteristically flexible ; and the con- 
test, therefore, ended in the deliverance of his kingdom from 
the infamy and the woes which his fatal facility of disposition 
would otherwise have inflicted on it. 

But, confident in their new and continually increasing 
strength, the French Reformers were roused by these injuries 
to a measure of self-defense and of self-assertion, which, to all 
who could read the signs of the times, announced the swift 
approach of a deadly conflict between the hosts which arranged 
themselves under the opposite banners of G-eneva and of Rome. 
Hitherto the Calvinists had met and worshiped together, at 
whatever times and places, and with whatever forms the con- 
veniences or exigencies of the passing moment suggested. 
Now they resolved to constitute themselves into a great national 
church, with ascertained laws, a regular organization, and pre- 
determined observances. Accordingly, on the 25th of May, 
1559, a general synod of all the Protestant congregations of 
the kingdom was solemnly convened and deliberately holden 
in the city of Paris. 

The ecclesiastical system adopted by this assembly was dic- 
tated by their great patriarch Calvin. It was prefaced by a 
general confession of the faith of the Reformed churches of 
France, and that confession was nothing else than an epitome 
of the doctrine taught m his own Institution Chretienne ; the 
great fundamental article of all being that the supreme rule 
and single criterion of truth among them was to be the revealed 
word of God. Then proceeding to the organization of their 
ecclesiastical polity, this solemn compact provided that, when- 
ever the faithful were living contiguously to each other in num- 
bers sufficient to form a separate local church, they should 
unite in electing a consistory (that is, a body of ruling elders), 
in calling a minister, and in providing for the celebration of 
the divine ordinances. All subsequent vacancies among the 
consistory or in the ministry were to be filled up by the elders, 
but subject to an effective veto on the part of the congregation. 
A certain number of local churches were each to elect an elder, 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 415 

who, with the respective ministers of all, were to form the con- 
ference of that locality. The kingdom of France being then 
divided into provinces (sixteen was the usual number of them), 
a provincial synod was to be holden annually in every province, 
composed of all the ministers within its precincts, and of one 
elder to be elected by each of the local churches which the 
province might comprise. At the summit of tliis hierarchy 
was placed a national synod, which was to meet once in each 
year, and to be composed of two ministers and of two elders 
representing each of the provincial synods. The conferences 
were to govern, in the first instance, the local churches witliin 
their several limits. The provincial synods were to have a 
jurisdiction at once concurrent with, and superior to, that of 
the conferences. The national synod was to be both the ulti- 
mate tribunal and the supreme Legislature of the whole body 
of the Protestant Church of France. Substitute for these titles 
the words presbyteries, ku'k sessions, and general assembly, 
and you have here a complete prototype of the existing Na- 
tional Church of Scotland. 

A great social revolution had thus been effected. Within 
the centre of the French monarchy Calvin and his disciples 
had established a spiritual republic, and had solemnly recog- 
nized as the basis of it four principles, each germinant of re- 
sults of the highest importance to the political commonwealth. 
Those principles were, fu'st, that the will of the people was the 
one legitimate source of the power of their rulers ; secondly, 
that power was most properly delegated by the people to their 
rulers by means of elections, in which every adult man might 
exercise the right of suffrage ; thirdly, that in ecclesiastical 
government the clergy and the laity were entitled to an equal 
and co-ordinate authority ; and, fourtlily, that between the 
Church and the State no alliance or mutual dependence, or 
other definite relation, necessarily or properly subsisted. The 
ultimate results of this decisive advance of the Calvinistic 
party will be considered hereafter. The immediate conse- 
quence of it was to bring to light the fact that in the bosom 
of the Parliament of Paris were concealed many of the follow- 
ers of Calvin who had hitherto wanted courage to avow them- 
selves. 

Of this number was Anne Dubourg, himself a magistrate of 



416 THE REFORMATION AND 

eminent learning, and the descendant of a family illustrious 
among the magistracy of France. In his place in the Parlia- 
ment, and in the presence of Henry, he now ventured not only 
to invoke a national council for the reform of religion in France, 
but even to denounce the persecution of heretics as a crime 
against Him whose holy name they were accustomed to adore 
with their dying breath. Dubourg expiated this audacity with 
his death. But, before the grave had been opened for him, it 
had closed on his royal persecutor. The accidental stroke of 
the lance of Count Montgomery, at the tournament of June, 
1559, terminated the reign and life of Henry, and transferred 
his crown to his eldest son, Francis II. 

Francis ascended the throne of his ancestors when he had 
scarcely completed his sixteenth year ; and the possession of 
the real government of France, under the name of the young 
and feeble king, became the prize for which tlxree unscrupu- 
lous rivals eagerly contended. 

First in rank, as in just pretensions, was the queen-mother, 
Catharine of Medici. She is one of those persons on the his- 
torical portraitures of whom it is painful and humiliating to 
dwell. None of them throw any doubt on her courage, her 
energy, or her commanding talents, and none of them ascribe 
to her any of the qualities we love, or of the virtues we esteem. 
They represent her to us as a living impersonation of the ideal 
prince of her countryman Machiavelli ; as engaged, through- 
out her long life, in the unremitting pursuit of dominion — of 
dominion on any terms, but as best pleased to obtain it by 
craft, by treachery, and by intrigue ; as rendering every other 
desire subservient to this one master passion ; as sacrificing to 
it even her conjugal and her maternal affections ; and as ex- 
hibiting the frightful aspect of a woman who, without human 
sympathies or religious principles, submitted herself to the des- 
potism of a blind selfishness, which shame could never daunt 
and conscience could never restrain. For the sake of our com- 
mon nature, let us trust that these pictures have been discol- 
ored by the too natural indignation and abhorrence of those 
from whom we have received them ; though, even if the colors 
be really too dark, it is, I fear, too late now to attempt any cor- 
rection of the error. 

The second of the aspirants for the government of the king 



THE *VARS OF RELIGION. 417 

and of liis kingdom was Francis, duke of G-uise. Just forty- 
six years before this time, his father, Claude of Lorraine, had 
quitted that duchy in search of better fortunes in France ; 
bringing thither, as the Protestant writers say, " nothing more 
than a stick in his hand, and one servant behind him." In 
France he became the father of four daughters and of six sons, 
of whom Francis, duke of Gruise, was the eldest, and Charles, 
cardinal of Lorraine, was the second. The duke was a skill- 
ful, high-spirited, irascible, and unscrupulous soldier, who had 
achieved great glory by the defense of Metz, by the capture of 
Calais, and by the victory of Renty. The cardinal, on the oth- 
er hand, was so remarkable for personal cowardice, that he was 
himself accustomed to make it the subject of his own pleas- 
antry. It was united (no unfrequent union) to a graceful elo- 
cution, insinuating manners, a penetrating foresight of coming 
events, and exquisite subtlety in the conduct of affairs. But 
the cardinal was also the victim of that chronic fever of am- 
bition from which timid men are usually exempt, and was 
haunted by importunate visions of the French crown resting 
on his brother's head, and of the Papal tiara alighting on his 
own. 

The third candidate for the administration of the govern- 
ment of France was Antoine, the head of the house of Bour- 
bon, and therefore the first prince of the blood royal next after 
the brothers of the king. He bore the title of King of Na- 
varre in right of Jane d'Albret his wife, who was the titular 
queen of that almost nominal sovereignty. The chief purpose 
of the otherwise purposeless existence of Anthony was to ex- 
change his empty title of King of Navarre for the dominion of 
some real kingdom in any place and on any terms;. He was 
one of those men whose characters shift with the shifting events 
of each successive day, or with the uncertain mood of each 
new associate. With the Calvinists he would chant hymns in 
the Pre-aux-Clercs at Paris, and with the Catholics he would 
attend a Calvinistic auto-da-fe at the Place de Grreve. 

Such having been the three aspirants to the regency, it re- 
mains to notice their great antagonist, G-aspard de Coligny, 
the military hero of the French Reformation. He was the sec- 
ond of the three sons of the Comte de Chatillon and of the sis- 
ter of the Constable Montmorency. Having either acquired 

Dd 



418 THE REFORMATION AND 

or confirmed his religious opinions by the study of the Scrip- 
tures during a protracted captivity which he underwent as a 
prisoner of war after the battle of St. (^uentin, he regarded the 
honors and emoluments of the world with a holy indifference, 
and, with the exception of his titular office of Admiral of 
France, renounced all the high and lucrative employments in 
the state which he had previously enjoyed. In the domestic 
privacy to which he retired, he became an example of the most 
severe self-discipline, united to a fervent and habitual devo- 
tion. In the civil wars into which he was afterward drawn, 
nothing was wanting to his glory except success ; for he was 
an unfortunate commander, and, though a braver man never 
drew his sword even in the armies of France, yet, in the crit- 
ical moments of battle, he was deficient in promptitude and 
decision. His younger brother D'Andelot was also a gallant 
but ill-fated officer in the Huguenot ranks ; while his elder 
brother, Odet Chatillon, who had become a cardinal in his sev- 
enteenth year, and had married in his more maturer days, end- 
ed his life in England as an exile. 

Coligny and his friends were the dupes of the artifices by 
which Catharine paved her sure, though slow and cautious 
path to the nominal regency and real sovereignty of France. 
To conciliate their favor, she assumed the appearance of a 
humble inquirer into the grounds of their doctrines, and they, 
with glad credulity, hailed her as a new Esther, born for the 
deliverance of the persecuted votaries of the truth. 

The Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine pursued a 
more direct and ingenious course than hers. Having effected 
the marriage of the king to their niece, Mary, queen of Scots, 
they seized upon all the highest stations of public trust and 
authority, the duke becoming general in chief of the royal for- 
ces, the cardinal assuming the superintendence of the royal 
finances. Never had the throne of France been more com- 
pletely overshadowed by those who had mounted on its foot- 
steps since the Merovingian kings had bowed to the supremacy 
of the mayors of their palace. 

The powers thus gained by the Princes of Lorraine were 
zealously employed for the destruction of the Calvinists. In 
every Parliament in the kingdom they established Chambers, 
charged with the especial office of trying, and consigning to 



THE AVARS OF RELIGION. 419 

tlie flames, all persons guilty of heresy ; and which, for that 
reason, received the appropriate title of Chambres ardentes. 
The Calvinists, while exasperated by these persecutions, were 
brought into frequent intercouse with the military suitors of 
the treasury, whose just but unwelcome demands the cardinal- 
superintendent had repelled with intolerable indignities. Mu- 
tually cherishing each other's resentments against their com- 
mon enemies, the two parties concerted together a plan for 
subverting, by their united arms, the usurped power of the 
duke and cardinal. The casuists of the Huguenots encour- 
aged the design, teaching that such resistance would not be 
unlawful if conducted under the guidance of a prince of the 
blood royal, and if sanctioned by the States-G-eneral of the 
realm. Louis de Conde, the brother of the King of Navarre, 
consented to fulfill the first of these conditions ; and it was re- 
solved by the confederates that, in due time, the second also 
should be accomplished. With their passions excited and their 
consciences tranquilized, they therefore resolved to seize the 
persons of the king, the cardinal, and the duke, in order that 
justice might be done upon the new mayors of the palace, and 
that the new Childeric might be transferred to a more faithful 
guardianship. 

The conspiracy of Amboise (for so the project was called, 
from the place at which it was to be carried into effect) was 
defeated by the treachery of one of the conspirators. The pun- 
ishments which followed are too horrible for description. Hun- 
dreds perished by the hands of the public executioners, and 
hundreds, bound hands and feet together, were thrown into the 
Loire. And thus, in the year 1560, were exactly anticipated 
the Noyades of the Revolution;, except, indeed, that a prince 
of the Church, Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, took the place of 
the butcher Carrier ; and except that Catharine of Medici, and 
her ladies of honor, assumed, in this dismal tragedy, charac- 
ters to which, even in the phrensy of the Reign of Terror, the 
vilest of the Poissardes of Paris would scarcely have descended. 

Nor were these the only disasters in which this ill-concerted 
scheme involved the Huguenots. They soon learned with ter- 
ror that it had supplied the Duke of Guise with a pretext for 
assuming the office of Lieutenant Greneral of France, and for 
extorting from the king a promise to sanction whatever acts 



420 THE REFORMATION AND 

he might do in that capacity ; and that it had afforded the 
Cardinal of Lorraine an excuse for establishing, by the royal 
edict of Romorantin, an episcopal tribunal in every diocese of 
the realm for the trial and punishment of heresy. 

But deep called unto deep. The alarmed and exhausted 
Huguenots, confident in their strength, or deriving courage 
from despair, rose in many parts of France to repel, or at least 
to punish their antagonists. Throughout the south and west 
of the kingdom, a large proportion of the churches were seized 
for their use, and devoted to their public worship, while in 
Dauphine and Provence they celebrated that worship sword 
in hand, and then pillaged the property of the Catholics, and 
abused the persons of their priesthood. Anarchy and civil war 
were brooding over the distracted land. 

In the midst of these tumults was raised a voice, earnestly 
and pathetically inculcating toleration and peace. It was the 
voice of the party called Les Politiques, of which the Chancel- 
lor I'Hopital was the head. They spoke with all the energy 
of wisdom and of truth, and with all the authority of the high- 
est rank and reputation to which any statesman of that age 
had risen in France by their own unaided and personal merits. 
Nor did they speak altogether in vain ; for not even Gruise or 
his brother could resist their instances that the Huguenots 
should at least be heard in their own vindication. 

In August, 1560, therefore, Coligny appeared before the king 
and an assembly of Notables, who had been convened for that 
purpose at Fontainebleau. Presenting to them the written 
petition of the whole Reformed Church of the kingdom, he de- 
manded the royal assent to their request for the free perform- 
ance of their public worship. " Your petition," replied the 
king, "bears the signature of no one." " True, sire," rejoined 
Coligny ; " but if you will allow us to meet for the purpose, I 
will, in one day, obtain in Normandy alone 50,000 signatures." 
Even if the number was exaggerated, it was an exaggeration 
which, from such lips, indicated a reality full of danger. Long 
and anxious were the debates which followed. They result^id 
in a decision to convene both the States-Greneral of the king- 
dom and a National Council, to decide what should be the re- 
ligious faith of the French people. Neither they, nor any other 
">eople, had as jet learned that any such absolute unity of be- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 421 

lief and of worship was not really possible, and was, perhaps, 
not even to be desired. 

I attempted in a former lecture to explain the general mo- 
tives which had induced all the four great political parties in 
France to concur in the convocation of the States-Greneral of 
Orleans. But there was yet a farther motive which recom- 
mended that measure to the Princes of Lorraine. It promised 
them a favorable opportunity for the execution of two atrocious 
treasons. Assuming that the convention of the representatives 
of the kingdom would lull the Huguenots into a false security, 
they meditated a military massacre, which, by destroying many 
of them in every province, was to strike at the very roots of the 
new heresy. Assuming, also, that the two princes of the house 
of Bourbon would present themselves at Orleans unprotected 
by any armed force, they had arranged a plan for the seizure 
and destruction of them both. This part of their project was 
at least partly accomplished ; for, when Louis of Conde entered 
the city, he was arrested by the followers of G-uise on a charge 
of participation in the conspiracy of Amboise. His brother, 
Anthony of Navarre, who accompanied him, was introduced 
into the presence of the king, where assassins stood ready to 
plunge their daggers into his bosom as soon as Francis had 
given the appointed signal. The heart of the royal boy, howev- 
er, revolted at the last moment from the contemplated mur- 
der, and Anthony survived that perilous interview, Yery short- 
ly afterward Francis was mercifully removed, by a sudden 
death, from the snares which environed his path. His less 
happy brother, Charles IX., succeeded him. 

This event was in effect a revolution. The Princes of Lor- 
raine, no longer allied to the sovereign, retired into a compar- 
ative obscurity. Their contemplated massacre was postponed 
to the day of St. Bartholomew. Conde was discharged from 
prison, and absolved of his imputed crimes ; Anthony of Na- 
varre became Lieutenant General of France ; Montmorency 
resumed his high office of Constable ; and the queen-mother, 
becoming regent, governed the person and kingdom of her in- 
fant son. 

The States-G-eneral of Orleans, though not productive of 
any direct measure in favor of the Reformers, materially pro- 
moted the interest of the Reformation, They had recognized 



422 THE REFORMATION AND 

the great principle of religious tolerance, and had, therefore^ 
given new courage to the disciples of Calvin. Ever watchful 
of such changes, Catharine of Medici once more presented her- 
self in the character of a devout inquirer into the truth of the 
new opinions. The halls other palace of Fontainebleau were 
thrown open to a Huguenot preacher. " It seemed," says the 
Jesuit Maimhourg, "as though the whole court had become 
Calvinist. Though it was mid Lent, their tables were covered 
with meat, and they made sport of images and indulgences, 
of the worship of the saints, of the ceremonies of the Church, 
and the authority of the Pope." In the midst of such scenes, 
the Reformers gave way to a not unnatural enthusiasm. Some- 
times they addressed eulogies to the queen-mother and the 
King of Navarre, and sometimes exhortations. Troops of mis- 
sionaries from G-eneva traversed the kingdom, and occupied 
the pulpits of France. Devotional and controversial writings 
were scattered from the Rhine to the Pyrenees as thickly as 
the leaves of autumn ; and the more sanguine Huguenots be- 
lieved in the approaching triumph of Calvin and his creed. 

This exultation aroused the vigilance and reanimated the 
hopes of the Princes of Lorraine. The famous courtesan, Di- 
ana of Poitiers, was still living, the ready instrument of any 
intrigue, and by her intervention was cemented that memora- 
ble alliance to which the French historians gave the name of 
the " Catholic Triumvirate." The whole military strength of 
France was under the command of St. Andre, a dissolute sol- 
dier, and of Montmorency the Constable. To each of them 
Diana proposed an alliance with G-uise ; to each were offered 
great pecuniary advantages ; while, to stimulate the family 
pride of Montmorency, he was assiduously reminded of the 
welcome legend that his great ancestor was the first baron and 
first Christian of France, and that he himself was, therefore, 
the hereditary defender of the faith and hierarchy of Rome. 

This new confederacy restored to the house of Lorraine the 
military strength of which the death of Francis had deprived 
them, and enabled Gruise to reappear, with renewed courage, 
in the Royal Council chamber. His returning influence there 
was speedily manifested. It gave occasion to the enactment 
of what was called the Edict of July, 1561 ; an edict which 
bespoke his unrelenting, yet cautious animosity to the Hugue- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 423 

nots ; for, while it forbade their public assemblies, it tolerated 
their private exercise of social worship, forbade all injuries 
against them on the ground of their religious opinions, and in- 
timated a national council for adjusting the religious contro- 
versies by which the realm was agitated. Such a synod ac- 
cordingly met at Poissy within a month from the date of this 
edict. 

The days of chivalry were giving place to the days of po- 
lemics, and the jousts of knights armed cap-a-pie were su- 
perseded by the theological tournaments of men of the gown. 
The one combat was, however, almost as unprofitable as the 
other. When the controversialists met at Poissy, they found 
all the most essential laws of their battle-field wholly unde- 
termined, and incapable of any determination. What were to 
be the questions to which the debate was to be confined ? The 
Huguenots insisted that the whole compass of doctrinal opin- 
ion was to be open to attack and defense. The Catholics, that 
the authority of the Church and the Real Presence must be 
finally decided before any other point was handled. What 
was to be the test of faith? "Holy Scripture alone," ex- 
claimed the reforming party. " Holy Scripture as interpreted 
by primaeval traditions, and by the Fathers and Councils," re- 
joined the adherents of the Papacy. Who are to adjudicate the 
victory between the disputants ? " The Civil G-overnment," 
answered the Calyinists. " The Hierarchy of the Church," 
replied their antagonists. To what good end, then, debate at 
all, in the face of such irreconcilable disputes as to the terms 
of the disputation ? To that question the common answer of 
both parties was, we debate, not in the hope ef conquering 
our antagonists, but in the belief that we shall encourage our 
friends ; and we take this method of appealing from our prej- 
udiced opponents to the world at large against the calumnies 
of which our persons are the objects, and by which our doc- 
trines are daily misrepresented. 

To the Doctors of the Sorbonne, indeed, such an appeal ap- 
peared eminently unwise. Twelve of them presented them- 
selves before Catharine, at Poissy, with a protest against it. 
Such discussions, they said, did not tend to edification, and 
especially when carried on in presence of a king whose tender 
years made him so peculiarly obnoxious to error. " I have 



424 THE REFORMATION AND 

good reasons for what I have done," answered Catharine ; 
" and it is too late to recede now; but (she added significant- 
ly) do not disturb yourselves — all will go well." It was a 
prophecy of which (in the sense of which it was made) she 
had taken good care to insure the fulfillment. 

In the refectory of the great convent at Poissy appeared, 
therefore, on the 9th of September, 1561, King Charles IX., a 
boy of eleven years of age, seated on his throne, having on one 
side of him the members of his family, the officers and ladies 
of his court, and on the other side six cardinals, with a vast 
array of bishops and of doctors. The boy-king addressed them 
in a formal speech ; the Chancellor I'Hopital in a conciliatory, 
wise, and almost Protestant oration. At the close of these ha- 
rangues, the Huguenots were, for the first time, introduced. 
Twelve of them were ministers, and the remaining twenty- 
two lay-deputies of the Calvinistic churches. Calvin himself 
was absent, because the French court had refused to give the 
securities for his safety which the Uepublic of Geneva had de- 
manded. In his stead appeared Theodore Beza, at once the 
most intimate of his friends and the most eminent of his dis- 
ciples. Nor was it a substitution to be regretted by their ad- 
herents ; for, however much inferior to Calvin in other respects, 
Beza far surpassed him in all the graces of elocution, and still 
retained the captivating amenity of manners for which he had 
been distinguished in his early years, and in the courtly cir- 
cles in which those years had been passed. 

The grave and simple habiliments of Beza and his associates 
contrasted strangely with the gorgeous apparel of their mitered 
antagonists. Nor were those humble-looking men received 
into the presence of that royal and ecclesiastical pageantry as 
colleagues to deliberate on equal terms, but rather as culprits 
standing at the bar to undergo a trial. Undaunted by the in- 
dignity, Beza first knelt down, and audibly implored the di- 
vine blessing on the assemblage ; and then, amid the profound 
attention of his audience, proceeded to recite and to interpret 
the articles of the Calvinistic creed. His eloquence had been 
progressively winning a signal triumph, until it reached a pas- 
sage in which, though admitting the real presence of Christ 
in the Eucharist, he denied his bodily presence there. " His 
body," he exclaimed, "is as remote from bread and wine as 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 425 

heaven is remote from earth." Indignant clamors interrupt- 
ed, though they did not eventually silence, the speaker ; and, 
after an adjournment of seven days, the synod was again as- 
sembled to listen to the answer which, in the interval, had 
heen carefully prepared for the Cardinal of Lorraine. He 
maintained, with great applause, first, the supreme authority 
of the Church ; and, secondly, the doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion ; and concluded by demanding that, before the debate pro- 
ceeded any farther, his opponents should prove their candor by 
subscribing each of the two propositions which he had thus 
demonstrated. The demand was of course ineffectual. An 
insuperable obstacle to any farther proceedings having thus 
been quickly, and perhaps fortunately discovered, the synod 
was brought to an early and premature conclusion. 

The theologians who had composed it remained, howevei", 
two weeks longer at Poissy, and held some private conferences 
there in a smaller chamber of the convent. Their meetings 
were productive of a few passages rather more exhilarating 
than either the theme itself, or the characters of those who han- 
dled it, might have seemed to promise. Thus, for example, 
the Cardinal of Lorraine tendered to Beza for his signature 
certain articles respecting the doctrine of transubstantiation 
extracted from the Confession of Augsburg, to which, therefore 
(sarcastically observed the cardinal), there can, of course, be 
no objection. "Your eminence will therefore begin," answered 
Beza, "by attaching your own signature." "Not I," replied 
the cardinal ; " I am not bound to subscribe to the declarations 
of any master." " You will scarcely then expect us," rejomed 
Beza, " to accept the very confession which you have yourself 
rejected." Bossuet reproaches the Calvinistic disputant with 
escaping the dilemma by a subtlety. He might, with equal 
reason, have reproached the cardinal for the subtlety with which 
he had attempted thus to avail himself of the dispute between 
the Lutheran and the Calvinistic churches. 

A far more formidable opponent than the cardinal next pre- 
sented himself in the person of lago Laynez, the second gen- 
eral of the Jesuits, at once the most eloquent, learned, and 
astute of all those in union with whom Loyola had laid the 
foundation of his order. But, on this occasion, Laynez lost 
himself, like many a great orator before and since his time, in 



426 THE REFORMATION AND 

the mazes of a long and intractable metaphor, and afforded to 
Beza the triumph, so dangerous to the most eloquent adversa- 
ry, of raising a general laugh at his expense. 

Catharine listened to these debates with a secret contempt 
for the dispute and the disputants. She thought that they 
were contending about words only ; and she inferred that they 
would consequently rejoice to terminate their warfare by a 
verbal compromise. At her instance, therefore, a formulary 
was prepared respecting the real presence in the Eucharist, 
with which Beza was reasonably, and the Cardinal of Lorraine 
indolently, satisfied. The Doctors of the Sorbonne, more learned 
and more sincere than the cardinal, however, rejected it with 
indignation. And now rhetoric and learning, pleasantry and 
double-mindedness, having each in turn attempted to bring the 
interlocutors at Poissy to some agreement, and having all at- 
tempted it in vain, the meeting broke up. It had distinctly 
convinced most men that such a dispute could not be adjusted 
by any weapon less keen than the sword. To L'Hopital and 
his partisans it had suggested the far more important conclu- 
sions that, in such a dispute, neither the sword nor the pen 
could really gain a final victory, but that mutual forgiveness 
and toleration might render any such victory superfluous. 

Yet, on the whole, the result of the synod or conference of 
Poissy was advantageous to the Calvinists. They had been 
publicly admitted into the presence of their sovereign to explain 
and to justify their doctrines. They had been heard with at- 
tention, if not with deference. The two religions had been 
allowed to stand so far on a footing of equality, that each had 
invoked in its support, not material force, but the reason of man 
illuminated by the written or unwritten revelations of Grod. 
In every part of France large accessions were consequently 
made to the number of the Reformers. Urgent demands for 
additional teachers were addressed to the Swiss and Genevese 
churches. Farel, now far advanced in years, reappeared in his 
native country, and preached the G-ospel to large and enthusi- 
astic assemblages. In the immediate vicinity of Paris itself, 
Beza addressed congregations which his followers estimated as 
sometimes rising to 40,000 people, and which his enemies ac- 
knowledged to have been seldom less than 8000. He even 
celebrated the marriage of the Count and Countess of Ptohan, 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 427 

in the presence of the Q,ueen of Navarre and of Conde ; and 
Coligny presented to the queen-mother a list of 2150 E-eformed 
congregations, over each of which separate ministers presided. 
The numbers of the Huguenots at that time in France was 
believed by some to amount to a half, and by the least sanguine 
to a tenth, of the whole population of the realm. L'Hopital 
is said to have inferred, from all the facts within his reach, 
that the population of the Huguenots to the Catholics was as 
one to three. But such calculations or conjectures must al- 
ways, and every where, be delusive. They proceed upon two 
fundamental errors : the first, that every member of society 
holds some fixed and deliberate religious belief; the second, 
that all who do not avowedly reject the established faith are 
among its real adherents. But, all the world over, the formal 
assenters to that faith outnumber the avowed dissenters from 
it ; and in religious, as well as in political controversy, the 
world is ever governed by minorities. 

Thus the Huguenot minority in France had become, at the 
close of the conferences of Poissy, effective enough to defy the 
laws which had been made against them, and to exact an 
amendment of the laws which had been made in their favor. 
They took possession of many of the churches of the Catholics, 
destroyed the relics, the images, and the crucifixes with which 
they were embellished, and demanded an enlargement of the 
privileges which had been granted to themselves by the edict 
of the Duke of G-uise, of July, 1561. For, while that edict 
tolerated their private meetings, it forbade their public assem- 
blies ; and such a prohibition the Calvinists would no longer 
obey in practice, nor patiently endure in principle. The de- 
mand was successful. L'Hopital, the ever -zealous patron of 
religious liberty, proposed to an assembly of the Notables the 
enactment of a new law, which authorized the public celebra- 
tion of the Reformed worship on the easy conditions that it did 
not take place within the walls of any fortified city ; that the 
worshipers did not assemble in arms ; and that they permitted 
the attendance of any officer of the crown who might require 
to be present. On the other hand, it was provided that the 
Huguenots should restore the churches which they had usurped, 
and that they should not give scandal to the Catholics by break- 
ing their images or crucifixes, or by any similar outrage. This 



428 THE REFORMATION AND 

law was called the Edict of January, 1562. It was willingly 
registered by the Parliaments in the south and west of France, 
and peremptorily rejected by the Parliament of Dijon. The 
Parliament of Paris at first refused to accept it, and accepted 
it at last only in obedience to repeated and positive commands 
from the king, and not even then without a protest that they 
did so in submission to necessity, without approving the new 
opinions, and awaiting the time when it might be possible to 
make other and better arrangements on the subject. By the 
Huguenots themselves, the edict of January, 1562, was received 
with gratitude, or rather with exultation. Except that they 
were still excluded from public preaching within the fortifica- 
tions of walled towns, they had at length, by many grievous 
sufferings, acquired whatever was necessary to the freedom of 
their worship and to the diffusion of their doctrines. For such 
a victory they rightly judged that the lives of their martyred 
brethren had not been an excessive price. 

Nothing, however, was more remote from the designs of the 
Triumvirate than that they should enjoy that victory in peace. 
Calling to their aid Philip II. and the Papal legate, they now 
assailed the Huguenots on the most vulnerable point of their 
defenses. It was their calamity to have been acting under the 
ostensible guidance and protection of Anthony of Navarre ; and 
to detach him from their cause, weak and frivolous as he was, 
would be to transfer to the side of their enemies all the exten- 
sive powers with which that prince was invested as lieutenant 
general of the kingdom. To accomplish his conversion to the 
faith of Rome, it was requisite to appeal, neither to his under- 
standing nor to his conscience, but simply to his egregious and 
well-known vanity. For this purpose, the highest dignitaries 
of Europe condescended to become parties to one of those farces 
in real life which the French call mystifications. Anthony's 
dominant idea and day-dream was that of an exchange of his 
nominal sovereignty of Navarre for a real crown and real sub- 
jects. The Pope, therefore, tempted him with proposals for a 
divorce from Jane d'Albret, his wife, on the ground of her noto- 
rious heresy, that he might be free to marry Mary, queen of 
Scots, and in her right to reign over Scotland. Philip II. offer- 
ed him the choice of a new kingdom in Africa or Sardinia, or 
the restitution of Navarre itself. One easy but indispensable 



THE WARS OF RELIGION, 429 

condition only must be first performed. He must embrace the 
faith and communion of the Holy See ; and that this embar- 
rassing measure might be reconciled to his royal honor, it was 
proposed that a conference of Huguenot and Catholic doctors 
should be holden in his presence, when he might gracefully, 
and with dignity, surrender himself to the convictions which 
would naturally follow on the argumentative triumph of the 
advocates of the religion of his forefathers. Every act of this 
projected comedy was exactly performed, and the head of the 
house of Bourbon, the father of Henry IV. of France, gave to 
his son the example of purchasing a crown by the public aban- 
donment of the faith of his early and of his mature life. The 
difference was, that the glittering prize actually rested on the 
brows of the son, while it only mocked the eager grasp of the 
father. 

The secession of Anthony of Navarre gave to the Triumvi- 
rate a feeble ally indeed, but a great accession of power. It 
placed at their disposal the armies which obeyed him as Lieu- 
tenant Greneral of France ; and it disquieted their antagonists, 
by teaching them how precarious was the trust they habitu- 
ally reposed in princes. In all the presumptuous confidence 
inspired by these new resources, the Princes of Lorraine now 
bound themselves, by a traitorous treaty with Philip II., to 
concur in the introduction into France, and in the employment 
there, of the forces of Spain, for the extermination of heresy. 
To this compact Anthony gave his sanction, and, in further- 
ance of it, he requested the Duke of Gruise to join him in a 
meditated attack on the Huguenots in Paris. 

On his way through Champagne for this purpose, the duke, 
passing near Vassy, heard the ringing of the church bells of 
that little town ; and, on inquiring about the cause, was an- 
swered that they were rung to call together the Huguenots to 
their religious exercises. " They shall soon," exclaimed the 
duke, " Huguenotize [Huguenotera) in a very different man- 
ner." Then riding up to the place of meeting, followed by 
about 300 of his retainers, they fell on the unarmed congrega- 
tion, killing three, and wounding others of them. The Hugue- 
nots defended themselves with the stones lying on the ground 
before them, with one of which the duke himself received a 
blow. In the indignation of the moment, he gave to his fol- 



430 THE REFORMATION AND 

lowers commands which they too well obeyed. At his bidding, 
and in his presence, they slew 60 and wounded 200 of the de- 
fenseless assembly. There was but little booty to be gained 
from such a foe ; but a volume was found which, till then, the 
duke had never seen. " Look," he exclaimed to his brother, 
the Cardinal of Lorraine, who had sheltered himself, during 
the slaughter, beneath an adjacent wall, " look, here is one of 
the books of these Huguenots." " There is no harm in this 
book," answered the cardinal ; " it is the Bible." " The Bible !" 
replied the learned adversary of the new faith ; " how can that 
be ? You see it is not a year since this book was published, 
and they say that the Bible was published more than 1500 
years ago." 

The massacre at Yassy was a direct infringement of the 
Edict of January, 1562. It was a defiance of all law by one 
of the chief nobles of France. It was an outrage so intoler- 
able and so full of menace, that if it should pass unpunished, 
there was an end to every hope of safety or of peace. Conde 
solemnly denounced the author of it to the queen-riiother as a 
murderer, a conspirator, and a traitor. Beza appealed to her 
for protection, and his flock invoked the aid of the governor of 
Paris — the Constable Montmorency. Catharine listened with 
terror, and answered with equivocations ; while, with all the 
zeal of a renegade, Anthony of Navarre defended the conduct 
of the duke, and apologized for the massacre. " Remember, 
sire," prophetically answered Beza, "that the Church is an 
anvil on which many a hammer has been broken," 

G-uise, however, was now irrevocably committed to a deadly 
strife with that invincible antagonist. Entering Paris amid 
the acclamations of the fanatical multitude, who hailed him as 
a new Judas Maccabeeus, he seized Catharine and Charles, and 
kept them in a strict though gentle captivity, fhst at For ^aine- 
bleau, and afterward at Melun and Yincennes. The triumph 
of the Triumvirate and of their domestic and foreign allies was 
short-lived. It was a triumph promptly and fearfully expi- 
ated. With the massacre of Yassy and the seizure of the king 
commenced the wars of religion — of all the dark tragedies wliich 
have been enacted in France, the darkest and the most disas- 
trous. Agrippa d'Aubigne, a contemporary historian, in his 
review of these events, recapitulates, in the following indig- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 431 

nant terms, the vindication of tlie Huguenots for plunging their 
country and themselves into those dismal hostilities. " So 
long," he says, " as the adherents of the new religion were de- 
stroyed merely under the forms of law, they submitted them- 
selves to the slaughter, and never raised a hand in their own 
defense against those injuries, cruel and iniquitous as they were. 
But when the puhlio authorities and the magistracy, divesting 
themselves of the venerable aspect of justice, put daggers into 
the hands of the people, abandoning every man to the violence 
of his neighbors ; and when public massacres were perpetrated 
to the sound of the drum and of the trumpet, who could forbid 
the unhappy sufferers to oppose hand to hand, and sword to 
sword, and to catch the contagion of a righteous fury from a 
fury unrestrained by any sense of justice ?" 

If, as is but too probable, I shall appear to have been se- 
duced by the preceding narrative from the problem which I 
proposed to myself at the commencement of this lecture, I 
can, for the present, only answer that it appears to me an in- 
dispensable preliminary to the solution of that problem. I do 
not think it possible to explain, intelligibly, why the protest 
made by so large a part of the people of France against the 
tyranny and the errors of the Roman Church was not follow- 
ed by any effectual resistance to the despotism of the reigning 
French dynasty, without first indicating what was the nature 
and what the principal stages of that great controversy. I 
hope to resume and to close that inquuy iai my next succeed- 
ing lecture. 



LECTURE XYL 

ON THE REFORMATION AND THE WARS OF RELIGION. 

The inquiry into the causes which rendered the Reforma- 
tion incapable of securing the constitutional liberty of the 
French people has conducted me to the commencement of the 
wars of religion. The history of those wars yet remains to be 
written. If, indeed, you turn to the Abbe Anquetil's Esprit 
de la Ligue, you will find there a catalogue of writers who 



432 THE REFORMATION AND 

have contemplated those events m almost every conceivable 
point of view, and under the bias of every conceivable prepos- 
session. But they have never yet been the subject of any com- 
prehensive narrative informed by the research and illuminated 
by the philosophy which characterize the great historical au- 
thors of the present age. M. Mignet's promised work, the fruit 
of twenty-five laborious years, will, I trust, ere long supply 
that deficiency. 

The historian of the wars of religion, whenever he shall ap- 
pear, may perhaps consider them as comprising three distinct 
periods, each of which has an aspect and a hero peculiar to it- 
self. The first would embrace the ten years which elapsed 
between the seizure of Orleans by Conde in 1562, and the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572 — years memorable for 
the too successful treacheries of Catharine de Medici. The 
second period, commencing from that fearful tragedy, and ter- 
minating with the assassination of Henry TIL in August, 1589, 
would exhibit the triumph and the fall of the great command- 
er of the League, Henry, the second Duke of G-uise. The 
third period would be that of the gallant struggle of Henry 
IV. against the Leaguers and their foreign allies, and would 
conclude with his purchase of the crown of France by the 
abandonment of the faith to the defense of which his life had 
been so solemnly consecrated both by his mother and by him- 
self. On each of these epochs I have a few observations to 
offer. 

First, then, the supposition that Catharine was a deliberate 
infidel, who had firmly rejected every religious creed, is sup- 
ported by no proof, and is opposed to all probabilities. Fanat- 
icism is the only disease of the human mind which could have 
so utterly extinguished in her bosom all the sympathies of the 
human heart. She must be supposed to have transcended all 
the known limits of the wickedness of our fallen race, if, dur- 
ing long years, she really meditated the crimes which signal- 
ize her name, without at the same time invoking the narcotic 
aid of some plausible sophistry. Doubtless she believed (for 
how common has ever been the belief?) that she was doing an 
acceptable service to G-od by the destruction of those whom 
she regarded as his enemies. Doubtless the habitual profliga- 
cy of her life and manners was not really incompatible (for 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 433 

how often has such guilt "been reconciled ?) with an earnest 
desire to propitiate the Divine favor. She was at once a cruel, 
ambitious, dissolute woman, and a zealous Catholic. 

Nothing, therefore, could be more grateful to her than the 
events of the first war or campaign, which was closed by the 
peace of Amboise. In the eleven months over which it extend- 
ed, both the Catholic and the Huguenot rivals of her favor had 
been overthrown. G-uise had fallen at the siege of Orleans by 
the hand of Poltrot ; Anthony, king of Navarre, had been slain 
before the walls of Rouen ; and on the field of Dreux St. An- 
dre had lost his life. Montmorency had been captured by the 
troops of Conde, and Conde himself had been made a prisoner 
of war by the troops of Montmorency. When false tidings 
from the battle announced to her that the Calvinists had con- 
quered, she calmly answered, " Well, then, we must say our 
prayers in French." When better intelligence assured her of 
the triumph of the Catholics, she still dressed her countenance 
in smiles, though with a more serious purpose. 

Conde was in her power. In common with the whole race 
of Bourbon, he was the slave of disorderly passions, and of 
that servitude the queen-mother well knew how to avail her- 
self. He had relished the society of his Calvinistic brethren 
in arms very much as our Charles the Second had enjoyed 
that of the Covenanters in Scotland ; and now spells were laid 
on him by the Armida of the French court, resembling those 
which, in a later age, were woven by the same court for that 
voluptuous member of the family of Stuart. She amused his 
captivity by splendid fetes ; she threw in his way temptations 
to more guilty pleasures ; and she fired his ambition with the 
promise of succeeding to the office of lieutenant general of the 
kingdom, which the death of the King of Navarre had vacated. 
Such allurements proved irresistible. Regardless of the re- 
monstrances of many of the captains, and of aU the ministers 
of the Huguenot armies, Conde, as the head of their party, 
and in exercise of the general powers with which they had in- 
vested him, signed the treaty of Amboise. It gave to the Re- 
formers a precarious peace, but it deprived them of the right 
which they held, under the edict of January, 1562, of worship- 
ing in public every where beyond the walls of fortified cities. 
Thenceforward they were to meet together for that purpose 

E E 



434 THE REFORMATION AND 

only in a single place within every bailliage of France wliicli 
was inhabited by Protestant nobles and their retainers. 

Yet Conde awaited in vain the promised wages of his infi- 
delity. To have raised him to the office of lieutenant general 
of France would have been to elevate him to a power not in- 
ferior to that of the regent of the kingdom herself, and Catha- 
rine would hazard no such competition. She therefore caused 
the majority of Charles IX. to be announced in his fourteenth 
year ; and a king reigning m his own right could not, of course 
(as it was urged), divide his authority, either with a regent 
or with a lieutenant. Palpable as was the duplicity of such 
a-n evasion of her promises, Conde could not even yet escape 
the fascinations which the queen-mother so well knew how to 
exercise over him. Grratified by other and less costly honors, 
he still took his place among the courtiers, and consented to 
preside at a meeting of the Royal Council for the promulga- 
tion of an edict which abridged even the narrow concessions 
on the subject of public worship, which his own Treaty of 
Amboise had made in favor of the Huguenots. After such an 
acquiescence Conde had ceased to be formidable ; and he si- 
lently witnessed the departure of Catharine and her son on a 
royal progress, in which she meditated yet farther encroach- 
ments on the hardly-earned privileges of the Reformed pastors 
and their flocks. 

At Roussillon, accordingly, the name and the authority of 
Charles were employed for that purpose ; and an edict of the 
4th of August, 1564, which took its title from that place, re- 
stramed the hitherto unlimited freedom of the worship of the 
Calvinists in private houses. Theirs was, at this time, the 
only power in the state which balanced that of the sovereigns ; 
and both the ambition and the bigotry of Catharine demanded 
an absolute conquest of all such competitors. To insure it, 
she advanced with her son as far as Bayonne, where, as the 
representative of Philip II., the Duke of Alva awaited them ; 
and with him she held long and secret consultations, the still 
extant records of which point, though darkly and dubiously, 
at the horrible catastrophe of St. Bartholomew, Whether the 
design was really then projected or not, it is at least certain 
that astrology never scared mankind with a more sinister con- 
junction than that which thus, for the first and last time, 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 435 

"broiiglit into the presence of each other the three deadly per- 
secutors of those times, Italian, French, and Spanish. 

The terrors inspired hy that ill-omened meeting, and the 
resentment kindled by the successive violations of the Treaty 
of Amboise, stimulated the Huguenots to take up again the 
arms which, in submission to that treaty, they had reluctantly 
laid down. They addressed remonstrances both to Conde and 
to Catharine. To him they complained of- his desertion of 
their interests. Of her they demanded the exact fulfillment 
of the terms of pacification. It was a demand to be evaded 
only by the weapons which never failed her — by falsehood 
and by guile. "The time," she said, "had now arrived (I 
quote, not the words, but the substance of her answer), when, 
laying aside their dissensions with each other, Frenchmen 
should all unite in guarding the independence of their native 
land. Alva was marching along the eastern frontiers of France 
with an army which, though avowedly destined to repress the 
seditious Flemings, might turn aside to invade the domin- 
ions of the house of Yalois. All faithful subjects of that house 
should, therefore, arm to avert such danger and disgrace from 
the noble kingdom, of which all were the common qhildren." 
Such appeals were never made in vain to Frenchmen. The 
Huguenots offered to raise and arm, at their own expense, 
several regiments for the patriotic service. Coligny advised a 
direct breach with Philip, and the reunion to the crown of 
France of its ancient fief of Flanders. The queen-mother ap- 
plauded their public spirit, but courteously declined their ad- 
vice. " Without imposing on the adherents of the new religion 
any such heavy burden, she could herself (she said) levy and 
equip the forces demanded by the occasion." Such forces 
were accordingly summoned, and they thronged round the 
royal banner with all the alacrity of that warlike people. It 
was a controversial age ; yet no religious differences disturbed 
the ranks of these zealous combatants, for no Hugrienots had 
been admitted into them ! While they believed that Catharine 
was arming against Spain, she had been bringing together an 
army of Catholics to act against themselves. Laying aside her 
mask, she hailed Alva as a deliverer, succored him as an ally, 
and prepared to enforce, by his assistance, a new edict for the 
entire suppression of the ritual and the faith of the Reformers. 



436 THE REFORMATION AND 

The imminent danger roused them from their credulous re- 
lianoe on the faithless Italian. Conde, awaking from his tor- 
por, attempted, at the head of a hasty assemblage of his ancient 
followers, to seize the persons of the queen-mother and her son 
at Mongeau, and, after pursuing them in their flight to Paris, 
found himself, on the 10th of November, 1567, in the presence 
of the royal forces, under the command of the Constable Mont- 
morency, on the' great plain of St. Denys. In the sanguinary 
battle which followed the Catholics triumphed, but their leader 
fell ; events for each of which Catharine expressed an equal 
gratitude. Her dominion could no longer be disputed by any 
rival, for the Constable had been the last survivor of the Tri- 
umvirate ; nor could it henceforM^ard be menaced by any relig- 
ious faction, for the strength of the Huguenots, as she will- 
ingly believed, was forever broken. 

A few weeks revealed to her the vanity of this exultation. 
The force of the vanquished Reformers seemed to thrive upon 
defeat. Retreating toward the Meuse, the remnant of their 
shattered bands effected a junction with the G-erman levies, 
which had marched to their support under the command of 
John Casimir, the son of the Elector Palatine, and from one 
extremity of France to the other the civil war again raged, 
but with redoubled fury. In turning over the dark records of 
that merciless age, the eye is painfully arrested by one most 
unwelcome incident. We may neither deny nor conceal that, 
in the city of Msmes, the Huguenots slaughtered, in cold 
blood, 120 Catholics, of whom no less than 72 were defense- 
less prisoners. It was, indeed, the act of a savage populace, 
agamst which their ministers and commanders expostulated 
in vain ; but, after such an act, we can not denounce the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew as a crime altogether without 
provocation or without example. 

It was, however, a crime which might, perhaps, have now 
been averted by the capture of Paris itself, if Conde, who had 
once more approached and straitened the city, had not once 
more also been the victim of Italian intrigue. With the cour- 
age which never failed her, Catharine herself appeared in his 
camp, there to verify the customary boast that her tongue and 
her pen were more than a match for the lances of her enemies. 
Never had that tongue been more profuse of blandishments or 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 437 

more successful. " Slie came the messenger of peace to heal 
the wounds of their bleeding country. For that end, what 
sacrifice she asked could be excessive ? An amnesty for all 
the past offenses, an unconditional acquiescence in all their 
present demands, were the only terms she could propose to the 
loyal, though misguided subjects of her son ; and guilty, in- 
deed (she argued), would be the ambition which should induce 
their chiefs to incur the responsibility of rejecting such pro- 
posals, and of protracting such a war." It no longer rested 
with those chiefs to refuse or to accept them. At the voice of 
the siren, their followers rapidly disbanded ; and on the 20th 
of March, 1568, the mere letter of her promises was fulfilled 
by the signature of a new act of pacification. From the place 
at which it was signed, it was called the Treaty of Longjumeau ; 
but from the jesters of the times it received the more appropri- 
ate name of the traite boiteux et mal assise, one of the negotia- 
tors having been lame, and the other having borne the name of 
Malassise. Mezerai dismisses it with the more serious remark, 
that it left the Huguenots to the mercy of their enemies, with 
no better guarantee than the word of an Italian woman. 

But, though the Treaty of Longjumeau added nothing to the 
real security of the Reformers, it effectually accomplished the 
real purpose of the queen-mother. It raised the threatened 
blockade and siege of Paris, and it dispersed the too credulous 
Calvinists and their commanders. But it neither crushed nor 
dispirited them. To Conde and Coligny, and to their followers, 
La Rochelle afforded an impregnable defense, and there they 
negotiated with Elizabeth for supplies both of forces and of 
money. 

The time had, however, now arrived, when, by one vigorous 
effort, Catharine might not unreasonably hope to bring these 
protracted hostilities to a close. Weakened by their own pre- 
cipitate disbandment, and abandoned by their German auxil- 
iaries, the Huguenots could no longer contend on equal terms 
with the royal armies, supported as they were by the zealous 
co-operation both of the Spanish and of the Papal crowns. The 
queen-mother, on the other hand, relieved by the death of the 
aged Montmorency from the encumbrance of his unskillful 
command, might now kindle the flame of French chivalry, and 
gratify her own feelings, by placing the conduct of the war in 



438 THE REFORMATION AND 

the hands of the Duke of Anjou, her thhd and favorite son, 
then a youth in his eighteenth year ; while, to avert the dan- 
gers of his inexperience, Strozzi, an officer of some celebrity 
as the leader of Italian Condottieri, might be appointed to su- 
perintend and guide his operations in the field. 

The campaign of 1569 was opened with these hopes, and, 
ere long, the justice of them was triumphantly vindicated. On 
the 16th of March of that year, Conde fell in the battle of Jar- 
nac, after witnessing the defeat of the forces under his orders. 
The body of the prince was treated with base indignities by 
Anjou. His conduct of the Protestant cause passed as a mel- 
ancholy, and, as it seemed, an undisputed inheritance to Co- 
ligny, when another and still more celebrated member of the 
house of Bourbon appeared as his successful competitor. 

At the town of Saintes, then the head-quarters of the Hu- 
guenots, Jane d'Albret presented herself, leading by either hand 
a boy, each of whom she came to devote to the sacred cause in 
which Conde had just fallen. One of those youths was his 
own son, and was now the heir of his title. The other, Henry 
of Beam, was the son of Jane herself, and of her deceased hus- 
band, Antoine, king of Navarre. Though he had not yet com- 
pleted his fifteenth year, the Calvinistic troops hailed him with 
acclamations as their general-in-chief and as the protector of 
their churches. The gallant boy welcomed the perilous com- 
mission, and answered by an oath to persevere in the struggle 
for religious liberty until either death or victory should have 
brought the contest to a close. 

Victory, however, was long to be wooed in vain by Henry of 
Navarre. Within a few weeks from his solemn vow and self- 
dedication, the hostile armies met on the field of Montcontour. 
Of all the combats of the Huguenots, it was the most disas- 
trous. Not more than 8000 of them escaped, leaving behind 
them more than twice that number of their comrades, either 
killed or prisoners, and carrying with them Coligny himself, 
covered with wounds and overwhelmed with sorrow. D'An- 
delot, his brother, was among the slain. A reward of 50,000 
crowns was offered for his own head. His house was burned, 
his estates pillaged, the wreck of his forces were in mutiny, 
and a large number of his friends had both abandoned and re- 
proached him. In the midst of these troubles, and within a 



THE WARS OF RELIGION, 439 

fortiiiglit from tlie loss of tlie battle, lie raised himself from his 
sick-bed to write the following letter to his children : " We 
will not (he said to them) repose onr hopes on any of those 
things in which the world confides, but will seek for something 
better than our eyes can see or our hands can handle. We will 
follow in the steps of Christ our commander. Man, it is true, 
has deprived us of all that man can take away, and, as such 
is the good pleasure of G-od, we will be satisfied and happy. 
Our consolation is, that we have not provoked these injuries 
by doing any wrong to those who have injured us, but that I 
have drawn upon me their hatred by having been employed by 
God for the defense and assistance of his Church. I will, 
therefore, add nothing more except that, in His name, I ad- 
monish and adjure you to persevere undauntedly in your stud- 
ies and in the practice of every Cliristian virtue." 

While Coligny was drawing these lessons of parental wis- 
dom from his defeat, it was celebrated with rapturous exulta- 
tion at Paris and Madrid, and with Te Deums at Rome. But 
scarcely had those triumphant strains died away before the in- 
domitable Huguenot was approaching the gates of Paris at the 
head of an army still more numerous, and better appointed than 
that which had been overthrown at Montcontour. At the tid- 
ings of that disaster, the mountaineers of the south and east 
of France, and the auxiliaries of Grermany, had crowded to his 
standard, and the commander who, but a few mionths before, 
had witnessed the annihilation of his army, was now prepar- 
ing the blockade of his enemies in their capital. Against such 
undying energy Catharine could contend no longer, and, on the 
8th of August, 1570, she assented to the treaty of St. Grermain's, 
which not only restored to the Huguenots the freedom of pub- 
lic worship, but placed in their keeping four cities (in the im- 
mediate vicinity of their resources and allies), to serve as a 
guarantee for their peaceable enjoyment of their new privileges. 

Within two years and sixteen days from the treaty of St. 
G-ermain's, Coligny himself was assassinated, and the streets 
of Paris were deformed by the slaughtered bodies of the vic- 
tims of the day of St. Bartholomew. If we rely on Davila, that 
treaty was signed by Catharine as a means of alluring the 
heretics into her toils, and of devoting them to the extermina- 
tion which he says had been so often meditated and so often 



440 THE REFORMATION AND 

postponed. But Davila is the constant dupe of his own sub- 
tlety, and of his belief that the avowed and the real motives 
of princes can never be the same. The hypothesis that the 
massacre was the result of so protracted a series of artifices is 
certainly gratuitous, and is, I think, incredible. 

In August, 1570, Catharine had many motives for a sincere 
reconciliation with the Huguenots. They had proved them- 
selves invincible, and yet there was no longer any reason to 
dread that they would be victorious. They had invariably 
been defeated in the field. Their numbers had diminished, 
and were still diminishing. Except to the south of the Loire, 
they were every where in a decided minority. Even there they 
were chiefly composed of the territorial lords and their rural 
retainers. The civic populations of France were almost ex- 
clusively Catholic. Paris was their intrenched camp, their 
arsenal, and their treasury. 

But over Paris and in the other great cities of the kingdom 
the house of G-uise was rapidly regaining the influence which 
had raised them, in the reign of Francis II., to a dominiort re- 
sembling that of the ancient mayors of the palace. Unless she 
could balance that power, Catharine had but little security for 
retaining her own, and an alliance with Coligny and his fol- 
lowers promised her that advantage with but little apparent 
hazard. 

Charles himself was the heir of the ambition of his grand- 
father, Francis I. To gratify it he had but to anticipate the 
policy of Eichelieu, by placing himself at the head of the Prot- 
estant against the Austrian powers of Europe. In that posi- 
tion he might regain for his crown the ancient French fief of 
Flanders ; the whole population of which, in revolt against 
Philip II., were passionately invoking his aid, and profl"ering 
to him their allegiance. But to that end the zealous support 
of his Protestant subjects was indispensable. 

"With such motives for fair dealing, why suppose Charles 
and his mother to have been treacherous ? Or if we imagine 
that truth could never find harbor in her bosom, even when it 
would best promote her selfish purposes, how shall we explain 
the events which actually followed the treaty of St. G-ermain's ? 
It is not a conjecture, but a fact beyond all dispute, that Co- 
ligny urged on Charles the policy of acquiring Flanders by a 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 441 

declaration of war against Philip, and that Charles listened to 
that advice with his characteristic eagerness. Active diplo- 
matic communications followed with the Protestant princes of 
Germany. A secret convention pledged the French king to 
supply succors to Louis of Nassau. Privateers were fitted out 
at La Rochelle against the fleets of Spain. Ships of war were 
stationed off the coast of Brittany, to intercept the succors 
destined for the relief of Alva, and an army was sent to the 
north of France with the same apparent object. A new edict 
M'^as made to prevent the interference of the Catholics with the 
education of the children of Protestants. Coligny was indem- 
nified for all his losses in the war. Marguerite, the sister of 
Charles, was given in marriage to Henry of Navarre ; and 
Charles himself, rejecting the offered hand of the daughter of 
Philip, wedded a Grerman princess. To ascribe all these acts, 
not to the obvious motive of gratifying the ambition of a young 
and high-spirited prince, but to the desire of blinding the eyes 
of the Huguenots to the fate impending over them, is an error 
into which no one will fall who has had to do with public af- 
fairs, not merely as a commentator, but as an agent in them ; 
for, to every such man, how often and how clearly has the se- 
cret been revealed that the world is governed by improvisations 
and by improvisatori, not by prescient calculations nor by far- 
sighted diviners of futurity ? 

Doubtless, however, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was a 
crime committed by Catharine and her sons, and her counsel- 
ors, deliberately and with premeditation. Nor is it difficult, 
at least, to conjecture why or when the tide of her favor toward 
her new Protestant allies first became refluent. When, in the 
spring of 1572, the approaching marriage of Henry of Navarre 
and Marguerite had filled Paris with the adherents of both re- 
ligions, the agents of Philip drew the attention of the queen- 
mother to a danger to which she seems to have till then been 
insensible. They informed her that, in the secret deliberations 
about the affairs of the Netherlands, to which Coligny had 
been admitted by Charles, he had counseled the young king to 
emancipate himself from the thraldom in which she held him, 
and that measures were in progress for removing her from any 
farther participation in the government of France. They bade 
her observe how universal was the enthusiasm of the capital 



442 THE REFORMATION AND 

in favor of the ancient faith and ritual, and how rancorous the 
antipathy with which the citizens regarded the innovators on 
it. They pointed out to her how her own and her son's attach- 
ment to the person of Coligny, and, as it was suspected, to his 
cause, was rapidly destroying their popularity, and elevating 
the Princes of Lorraine to a power which would soon become 
too formidable for restraint ; and they appear to have suc- 
ceeded in convincing her that the only condition on which she 
could prolong her reign in France was that of employing the 
house of Gruise and the Catholics as her agents to crush the 
Huguenots, that so she might at once predominate and triumph 
over both. The documents of that time (so far as I have any 
acquaintance with them) seem to me to trace, with sufficient 
clearness, to such considerations as these, the departure of 
Catharine, in August, 1572, from the policy which, in August, 
1570, had dictated the treaty of St. G-ermain's. Although the 
methods taken at last to assemble the whole Huguenot aris- 
tocracy at Paris, and so bring them within her power, may 
indicate that she cherished an insidious design against them 
during some weeks before the actual perpetration of the mas- 
sacre, we need not suppose it to have been preceded by a de- 
liberate hypocrisy, maintained during two whole years of 
avowed and seeming friendship. 

It is for the credit of us all not to exaggerate the darkness 
of a crime which has left so foul and indelible a disgrace upon 
our common nature ; for, horrible as was the act itself, the 
subsequent celebration of it was even yet more revolting. 
Pope G-regory XHI. and his cardinals went in procession to 
the church of St. Mark, not to deprecate in sackcloth and ashes 
the divine vengeance on a guilty people, but " to render solemn 
thanksgivings to G-od, the infinitely great and good (such is 
the contemporary record), for the. great mercy which he had 
vouchsafed to the See of Rome and to the whole Christian 
world." A picture of the massacre was added to the embel- 
lishments of the Vatican, and by the pontiff's order a golden 
medal was struck, to commemorate to all ages the triumph of 
the Church over her enemies. The Pope found meet compan- 
ions of his joy among the players. In all the cities of France 
they frequently exhibited a tragedy called the death of Colig- 
ny, in which he and his brother D'Andelot were represented 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 443 

enduring the fearful torments and cherishing the mahgnant 
passions with which the imagination of Dante has arrayed the 
place of future punishment. 

Burdened as the heart is with the remembrance that the 
princes who executed this butchery, that the priests who 
thanked Grod for it in their masses, that the mimes who 
chuckled over it in their ribaldry, and that the crowds who 
night after night applauded them, were all our brethren, re- 
flecting to us in their actual guilt our own possible criminali- 
ty, I know not whether the apology which some recent French 
historians have offered for their ancestors be not even yet more 
offensive. It is, they tell us, a mere prejudice to blame any 
one. Man is but the creature of the age in which he lives. 
He is borne onward by the irresistible current of events, the 
sport of a fatality with which it is not given him to contend, , 
the helpless victim of those passions which infect and agitate 
the social system of which he happens to be a member. This 
doctrine, which a great historian of the French Revolution 
brought to light to shelter its atrocities, has been adopted by 
meaner, though not unpopular hands, to reconcile us to those 
of St. Bartholomew. It is sufficient to answer, if indeed to 
such profane extravagance any answer be due, that if fate 
compelled Catharine and her sons, and their subjects, to com- 
mit such offenses, and constrained Pope Grregory XIII. and his 
cardinals to celebrate them with festive adorations, the same 
inexorable fate imposes upon us the necessity of holding their 
deeds and their memories in everlasting abhorrence. The in- 
vocation of this stern deity from the Homeric Hades can nev- 
er shed any real light over the ways of this upper world. In- 
stead of affording a real or a plausible solution of the myste- 
ries which surround us, it does at best but encumber the at- 
tempt to resolve them by the interposition of an unmeaning 
word. • It is one of those many refuges of lies, the real pur- 
pose of which is to dethrone the Creator from the moral gov- 
ernment of his creation. 

With the massacre of St. Bartholomew closes the first of the 
three periods of the Avars of religion. The era of treacheries 
was now to give place to the era of conspiracies — the domin- 
ion of Catharine to the supremacy of Henry, duke of G-uise. 
France may be considered as having henceforward resolved 



444 THE REFORMATION AND 

itself into four encampments, sometimes warring, sometimes 
intriguing with each other, but each maintaining a separate 
policy, and aiming at distinct objects." 

First. The Huguenots, acknowledging as their joint chiefs 
Henry of Navarre and his cousin, the younger Conde, were 
composed of two dissimilar sections — the Consistoriaux and 
the G-entilshommes. The Consistoriaux comprised nearly all 
the Calvinistic ministers and their disciples of low degree. 
They had associated themselves together with the single ob- 
ject of vindicating their freedom of private conscience and pub- 
lic worship. They took up arms, even for that purpose, slow- 
ly and with reluctance ; but they were not less reluctant to 
lay them down again until it had been accomplished. The 
G-entilshommes, on the other hand, were men of rank and for- 
tune, with whom Huguenoterie was a family religion, a party 
watchword, or a point of honor, but was seldom able to tri- 
umph over their selfish interests or personal ambition. 

Secondly. The Politiques had originally been combined to- 
gether as a party by the Chancellor I'Hopital ; and, after his 
disappearance from the world, they regarded as their chief 
Damville, the governor of Languedoc, the second of the three 
sons of the Constable Montmorency. The Politiques all pro- 
fessed the religion of Rome, but were desirous, by mutual tol- 
eration, to unite all Frenchmen to each other, and to engage 
them all in resistance to the Papal despotism. They num- 
bered in their ranks the governors of several provinces, a large 
part of the magistracy, and some ministers of the Royal Coun- 
cil, who abhorred the carnage of St. Bartholomew, and were 
indignant at the degradation into which the court of France 
had fallen. 

Thirdly. The Catholic League was a union, under the pres- 
idency of Henry, duke of G-uise, of many local societies, which 
had been formed in some of the chief cities of France for the 
defense of the ancient faith. But the purposes of these asso- 
ciations, when thus combined together, acquired a precision 
and an audacity unknown to the designs of any of those sep- 
arate bodies. The credit or responsibility of having thus ma- 
tured so many different projects into one great and consistent 
conspiracy belongs to David, an advocate, who, in the year 
1576, proposed to Pope Gregory XHI. a plan, which that pon- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 445 

tiff ultimately sanctioned, and promised to reconcile to tlie con- 
sciences of the people of France. It was nothing less than the 
deposition of the house of Valois in favor of the house of Guise, 
on condition of their engaging to annul all edicts of toleration ; 
to exterminate all forms of heresy ; to accept the decrees of 
the Council of Trent ; to acknowledge their own spiritual al- 
legiance to the Papacy ; and to obtain from the States-Greneral 
of France a similar acknowledgment. Even in the commis- 
sion of such a treason, the advocate could not renounce his pro- 
fessional solicitude to be fortified by legal arguments, and Da- 
vid therefore conducted Gregory to the desired conclusion by 
the following chain of reasoning : 

First ; Pepin, he said, had acquired the crown of France 
from the donation of Pope Zachary. Secondly ; together with 
that temporal right, Zachary had conferred upon Pepin an ap- 
ostolical benediction. Thirdly ; Hugues Capet had, six hund- 
red years before, usurped the secular sovereignty which his 
descendants still retained. But, fourthly, neither he nor they 
had inherited, or could usurp, the apostolical benediction which 
was indispensable to the spiritual character of every legitimate 
dynasty. Fifthly ; the right of the successors of St. Peter to 
confer that benediction, and with it that spiritual character 
and legitimate power, was indefeasible and imprescriptible. 
Sixthly ; it was their duty to confer it on the most worthy. 
Seventhly ; the superiority of desert plainly belonged to Hen- 
ry, duke of Guise ; and, finally, if Gregory would bestow on 
him the spiritual title to the French crown, the mere temporal 
right must follow as a comparatively unimportant but insep- 
arable accessory. 

Of David's biography I know nothing, but it seems impos- 
sible that so astute a lawyer should have missed of distinction 
in the Palais de Justice. His esoteric doctrines were lono" re- 
served for those who were initiated into the higher mysteries 
of the League. His exoteric teaching was propagated in the 
form of an act of association, through almost every province, 
city, and hamlet of France. Many different forms of it, indeed, 
seem to have been in use, but in each of them the subscribers 
bound themselves by three distinct pledges — the first, to assist 
all the other members of the confederacy ; the second, to ren- 
der an absolute obedience to its chief ; and the third, to devote 



446 THE REFORMATION AND 

every thing, life itself included, to the extermination of the her- 
etics, and to the exclusion from France of every religion other 
than that of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman See. 

There was no age, or sex, or profession, or trade, or rank in 
France which did not contribute many members to this Holy 
League. But foremost in zeal were the Clergy. The bishop 
and chapter of every cathedral, the abbot and monks of every 
monastery, the brethren of every religious order, and the in- 
cumbents of every parish church, were organized into a com- 
pact spiritual militia, with garrisons in every city, and de- 
tachments in every village of the kmgdom, ever ready to ani- 
mate the zealous and to rebuke the languid in the same sacred 
cause, and to cheer, with assurances of present pardon and 
future peace, every one who hazarded his life in defense of it. 

Second only to the Clerical were the Civic partisans of the 
League, and, among all cities, Paris was pre-eminent for her 
devotedness. The ancient corporate institutions of the capi- 
tal became the basis of the new political or religious organi- 
zation. The prevots of the merchants in their respective dis- 
tricts became lieutenants of the League in each. Every guild 
resolved itself into a committee for promoting the success of 
that holy alliance. The Dixaniers, or officers of the town 
guard, were all placed at the head of companies, which might 
be convened at the first sound of the tocsin. The Q,uarteniers, 
or chiefs of the sixteen quarters of Paris, had each the com- 
mand of a regiment of Leaguers ; and the Sections, to wliich, 
in a later age, the revolutionary leaders gave so fearful a ce- 
lebrity, were called into action for the first time, not by them, 
but by the Leaguers of the sixteenth century. 

Religious enthusiasm, though the most active, was not the 
single principle of their association. Their leaders were skill- 
ful to touch all the chords to which the plebeian mind habit- • 
ually vibrates ; and they did not attempt the subversion of an 
ancient dynasty by the hands of the people without themselves 
cultivating the character and the arts of demagogues — a char- 
acter which no magnanimous man will ever assume, and arts 
which no honest man will ever practice. Although neither 
magnanimous nor honest, or rather because he was neither, 
G-uise excelled all men in the power of winning the popular 
confidence and of controlling the popular will. Gifted with 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 447 

illustrious liereditary rank, a noble presence, a frank and court- 
eous tearing, invincible courage, sympathy, or the resemblance 
of sympathy, with the suffering many against the prosperous 
few, and prodigal without stint in promises of reform, he was 
the favorite courtier of the multitudes who, from his lips, ea- 
gerly accepted their accustomed tribute of lavish flattery ad- 
dressed to themselves, and of bitter invective directed against 
their superiors. Proposing to become the Napoleon, he com- 
menced by becoming the Mirabeau of his generation. The 
League, therefore, under his orders, distributed manifestoes 
echoing all the grievances of the States- G-eneral. It demand- 
ed, not merely an absolute unity of religion in France, but the 
abolition of taxes, the independence of the Parliaments, and 
triennial States-Greneral, It became a great Democratic Con- 
federacy for the overtlirow not merely of the heresies of the 
Huguenots, but of many of the prerogatives of the royal house, 
and of many privileges of the seignorial families. 

And yet some of the noblest of those families continued to 
increase both the power and the numbers of the confederates. 
By joining their ranks, the Dukes of Nevers, Mercoeur, Aumale, 
and Elbeuf, with a long list of inferior grandees, rose to mili- 
tary commands, to civic governments, and to offices of emolu- 
ment. Nor were there wanting magistrates of eminent wis- 
dom, nor even men of undisputed moral worth, to impart to 
the League the weight of their judicial authority and of their 
personal virtues. 

The most efficient allies, however, of Gruise and his follow- 
ers were the pontiffs who, in that age, occupied the chair of 
St. Peter. That G-regory XIIL, who had chanted eucharistic 
masses in honor of the darkest crime which stains the annals 
of Cliristendom, should have been the willing dupe of the 
sophisms of the advocate David, is not surprising ; but from 
his successor, Sixtus V., better things might not unreasonably 
have been expected, for he holds no mean rank among the 
magnanimous princes who, at no infrequent intervals, have 
worn the Papal tiara. The amusing account of his life by 
G-regorio Leti, which most of us may have read either m Ital- 
ian or in English, must be considered rather as a romance 
than as a history ; for the biographer of Sixtus lacked either 
the diligence to study, or the capacity to appreciate, the eleva- 



448 THE REFORMATION AND 

tion and the dignity of his hero. Though no canonized Thau- 
maturgist, Sixtus wrought architectural miracles, which to 
this hour astonish and delight every visitor of Rome, and is 
celebrated by Ranke as amcng the wisest of the legislators, 
and the most vigorous of the administrators, by whom the 
Ecclesiastical States have been governed. He was a celebra- 
ted preacher, a laborious scholar, and a liberal patron of litera- 
ture ; and the edition of the Holy Scriptures, which was print- 
ed during his reign at his own press, was throughout corrected 
by his own hand. He labored at the internal reformation of 
the Church over which he presided ; and the best attestation 
of his personal worth and piety is, that he enjoyed the affec- 
tion and esteem of St. Charles of Borromeo. And yet, such is 
the power of our corrupt passions when engaged in any cause 
which is supposed to sanctify the indulgence of them, that 
Sixtus encouraged and applauded, and became responsible for, 
crimes which " might have wounded the conscience of a buc- 
caneer." 

In Philip II. of Spain the Leaguevs had yet another associ- 
ate, whose zeal for their cause burned fiercely, though his at- 
tachment to their persons and to theu* political privileges was 
but equivocal. In his letters, for the publication of which the 
world is indebted to M. Capefigue, he exhibits himself in a 
character for a resemblance to which all the preceding history 
of mankind may be traced in vain, till we ascend to the mo- 
rose and gloomy solitude of Tiberias at Caprese. From his 
silent retreat at St. Lorenzo, Philip contemplated the outer 
world in a spirit in which the dark melancholy of Johanna, 
and the boundless ambition of Charles, his two immediate 
predecessors, were combined with the marble-hearted fanati- 
cism and the austere devotion of St. Dominic, to the mainte- 
nance of whose institutes he and they had been devoted. En- 
dowed with unrivaled wealth, and power, and talents, and 
constancy of purpose, he employed them all to establish the 
two cardinal principles by which, as he judged, this fair world 
and every province of it ought to be governed ; the one, the 
absolute dominion of the See of Rome in all spiritual matters, 
the other the absolute dominion of the crown in all secular 
aifairs. To use or to assert the right of private judgment was 
treason against the Tiara. To refuse a passive and implicit 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 449 

obedience to the prince was treason against the Diadem. To 
those ecclesiastical and temporal chiefs, and to them alone, it 
belonged to direct the conduct of mankind. To all other men 
it belonged only to submit themselves to that supreme guid- 
ance. The tide of mental and political freedom was rising on 
every side around him, and to their proud waves he opposed 
the stern and inflexible resistance of those maxims, boldly as- 
serted in theory, and as boldly reduced to practice. 

The democratic tendencies of the Holy League had, there- 
fore, excited the jealousy of Philip, even while he aided with 
complacency the death struggles in which it was engaged 
with Protestantism. And thus it happened that, while lavish 
in promises to the confederates, he actually afforded them his 
support with wary and hesitating steps. His true design may 
clearly be traced in his correspondence. It was first to unite 
the Leaguers and the king for the destruction of the Hugue- 
nots in France, and then to enlist them both in his own more 
comprehensive project for exterminating all the heretics in Eu- 
rope by a union of the Catholic powers, acting under his own 
direction in the cabinet, and under the command of Alexander 
Farnese and his other generals in the field. 

Far as the event fell short of his anticipations, they were 
not wholly unfulfilled. But his success was purchased at the 
expense of the imperishable hatred of his own name, of the 
debasement of his descendants, and of the degradation which 
from that age to our own has overspread his once prosperous 
and formidable kingdom. 

The fourth and last of the parties into which France was 
divided was composed of the king, the queen-mother, and the 
adherents of their court. It is difficult to characterize this 
body without touching on topics on which it is irksome to 
dwell, and the particular mention of which might involve some 
impropriety. Charles IX. had died within a few months from 
the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and it seems more chari- 
table with his enemies to believe, than with his partisans 
to deny, that his last hours were consumed in agonies of re- 
morse. Henry III., his brother and successor, excited equal 
wonder by his superstition and his licentiousness. Sometimes 
he might be seen traversing the streets as a flagellant, with 
bare head and feet, and with shoulders which afforded the 

F F 



450 THE REFORMATION AND 

most unequivocal proofs that his whip had not fallen on them 
idly or in sport. At other times he would join in a religious 
procession, accompanied by Sibillot, his favorite fool, who par- 
odied, in grotesque antics and irreverent songs, the ceremonial 
and the chants of that devout solemnity. The next hour would 
find him bestowing the most costly and extravagant favors on 
the youths by whom he was surrounded, or outraging not only 
the dignity of his crown, but the decorous gravity of manhood, 
by the exaggeration, in his own person, of their debauched 
manners and effeminate appearance; or even descending so 
low as to amuse them by assuming female attire, and repre- 
senting before them equivocal female characters. And yet 
among these lawless revelers (Mignons was the name they 
familiarly bore) were many who, with all the light-hearted 
gallantry of their native land, could dally with danger and 
with death on the field of battle ; and two of them, the Dukes 
de Joyeuse and D'Epernon, rose to eminence both as military 
commanders and as statesmen. 

Catharine, the queen-mother, though in the decline of life, 
retained all her ancient passion for power, for treachery, and 
for intrigue ; but, adapting her machinations to the now di- 
minished authority of the crown, she won adherents to the 
royal cause by the same shameful arts in which the Princes 
of Midian were instructed by the Chaldean prophet. Follow- 
ed by a train of maids of honor, than whom no ladies ever less 
merited that title, she used them as her too ready instruments 
of seducing those whom she could not otherwise subdue, not 
scrupling to spread such toils even for her own son-in-law, 
Henry, the brave but too ductile and self-indulgent King of 
Navarre. 

The history of France, during the second period of the wars 
of religion, is composed of the intrigues and conflicts by which 
these four parties, the Huguenots, the Politiques, the League, 
and the Court, endeavored to deceive, to conciliate, or to con- 
quer one another. The successive involutions of their policy 
are developed in the annals of their age with a rapidity like 
that with which the scenes are shifted in a mimic theatre. 
At one time the Huguenots alone successfully resist the royal 
arms. Then, entering into a traitorous conspiracy with each 
other, the Huguenots and the Politiques establish a state with- 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 451 

in a state, and hy their comliined forces extort from the king 
an ahnost unconditional acquiescence in their joint demands. 
The next act of the drama finds the crown and the Politiques 
allied against the Huguenots, and compelling them to surren- 
der most of their recently acquired privileges. The League 
now appears on the crowded stage, constraining the court to 
subscribe a compact with them for the utter extirpation of 
heretics and of heresy from the land. The papal thunders are 
then heard in the distance, excommunicating "the bastard and 
detestable race of the Bourbons," and depriving them of the 
succession to the crown of France — an insult which Henry of 
Navarre answers by the destruction of the Catholic army at 
Coutras, while Guise avenges that loss by overwhelming the 
Protestant army of German auxiliaries. Those events are 
followed by the barricades of Paris, the flight of the king to 
Chartres, his humiliations at that city, the second States-G-en- 
eral of Blois, and the assassination of Guise by the command 
and in the presence of his sovereign. The Royalists, the Pol- 
itiques, and the Huguenots, then forming a temporary alliance, 
assemble a vast army for the capture of Paris and the anni- 
hilation of the League. But at that critical moment the knife 
of the monk Jacques Clement retaliates the murder of Guise 
by the assassination of his royal murderer, and changes the 
whole conduct and character of the war. In that age of ter- 
ror the deed excited but little abhorrence, though even that 
iron generation must have been appalled to hear that Pope 
Sixtus v., calling himself the vicar of Christ on earth, had, in 
the full consistory at Rome, hazarded the frightful avowal 
that he regarded the self-devotion and martyrdom of Clement 
as admitting of no unequal comparison with the self-sacrifice 
which had been endured at Calvary. 

The house of Yalois was now extinct. Those bloody and 
deceitful men had not lived out half their days. Henry II. 
perished in the prime of life by the lance of Montgomery. His 
eldest son, Francis II., did not complete his nineteenth year. 
The unhappy Charles IX., his second son, had not reached the 
age of twenty-four when he died, in strange and fearful tor- 
ments. At the same early period, the Duke d'Alenpon, the 
fourth son of Henry, fell a victim to intemperance. Henry 
III., his only other son, was assassinated in his thirty-eighth 



452 THE REFORMATION AND 

year. Francis of Gruise met the same fate, while in the full 
vigor of his manhood ; and Henry of Gruise had not accomplish- 
ed his thirty-seventh year, when he, also, was struck down by 
the daggers of hired murderers. It was not without an intel- 
ligible and an awful purpose that a retributive providence thus 
openly rebuked the persecutors of their brethren ; and yet the 
condemnation which impartial history must pronounce on all 
the later sovereigns of the house of Valois may, perhaps, be 
justly mitigated by the belief that the madness of their pred- 
ecessor, Charles YI., was, to some extent, hereditary in his 
race. It is a welcome escape from conclusions hardly other- 
wise to be avoided, but which the reverence due to our com- 
mon humanity must make every one anxious to avoid. 

The third and last period of the wars of religion belongs to 
the military rather than to the civil annals of France. It has 
been sung by the French Yirgil in the French ^Eneid ; and 
they who have read the Henriade (if, indeed, any of us can 
honestly say that they ever did or could read it) would hardly 
endure a prosaic account of that merciless controversy. De- 
spite all the enthusiasm of Yoltaire, I must, however, doubt 
whether his iEneas was really a great captain ; and I regard 
it as beyond all dispute, that his story, like that of his Trojan 
prototype, is rather disfigured than embellished by the Didos 
who occupy so conspicuous a place in it. But no wit or genius 
can ever rescue the real catastrophe of the French epic from 
shame, and regret, and indignation. 

Henry lY. had been trained in the Calvinistio creed by his 
mother, Jane d'Albret. D'Aubigne, who knew her well, says 
of her, that though perfectly feminine in every other respect, 
she possessed a masculine intrepidity of soul ; that her capac- 
ity was equal to the most arduous duties, and her heart in- 
vincible by the greatest calamities. Her son was the heir of 
her courage and her understanding, but not of her devotion or 
her constancy. The early impressions of her maternal love 
and wisdom were, probably, never altogether obliterated from 
his mind, even by the habitual licentiousness both of his early 
and of his mature life. Yet such license never was, and never 
can be, associated with the faith which prepares man, by self- 
conquest, to become the conqueror of the world. So far as any 
real religious convictions can be ascribed to Henry, he seems 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 453 

to have been a Protestant to the last ; hut that no such con- 
victions had a very firm hold on his mind is the inference to 
he drawn from almost every passage of his life. When at last 
he preferred the abandonment of his creed to the loss of his 
crown, it may perhaps have appeared to himself, as it evidently 
did to his friends, that he was rather incurring an imputation 
on his honor as a gentleman than inflicting a wound on his 
conscience as a Christian. To this day the apostasy is defend- 
ed and the dishonor denied by many of his countrymen, on 
grounds against which a protest must be rriade by every one 
to whom truth and integrity are something better than empty 
words. 

"Consider," it is said, "the consequences which hung on 
his decision. By adhering to the Reformed Church, he must 
have prolonged the most disastrous of all civil wars — he must 
have seen the dismemberment of France between the League 
and Philip II. — he must himself haye been superseded in favor 
of the Duke of Mayenne, by the States- G-eneral whom the duke 
had convened at Paris — he must thus have abdicated the tlirone 
of the Bourbons to the house of Gruise, and must have delivered 
up the Huguenots as defenseless victims to the bigotry of the 
Leaguers and their head. On the other hand, by returning to 
the bosom of the Church of Rome, Henry," proceed his apol- 
ogists, "had the certainty, not only of escaping these dangers, 
but of restoring peace to his kingdom, of transmitting the 
crown to his posterity, and of securing toleration to his ancient 
Protestant adherents. "With what reason of humanity," they 
ask, "could he, in the prospect of such consequences, persist 
any longer in maintaining a religious creed, and observing an 
ecclesiastical ritual, to which, after all, he had never given 
more than a hesitating and thoughtless preference ?" 

To the question thus stated may first be opposed another 
question, What is the depth of criminality thus imputed to 
Henry IV. by those who represent him as conducting, during 
many successive years, the most deadly civil war recorded in 
the History of Christendom for the establishment of a religion 
to which neither his heart nor his understanding yielded any 
genuine allegiance ? His accusers have never raised so heavy 
an accusation against him as is thus preferred by his apologists. 
The reverence due to the memory of so gi-eat a man, and all 



454 THE REFORMATION AND 

the probabilities of the case, require us to reject the hypothesis 
that he was a hypocrite, even when leading the Huguenots in 
the fields of Coutras and of Ivry. His real responsibility is 
that of having acted on the belief that, by disavowing his 
faith, he. would best promote the interests of his people, of his 
descendants, and of himself. His error was that of elevating 
the human above the Divine prescience, and of claiming for 
the foresight of man a higher authority than for the immuta- 
ble laws of G-od. Doubtless it was not without some plausible 
sophistry that he reconciled to himself so willful and so solemn 
a departure from the sacred obligations of truth. Doubtless 
he believed it to be, on the whole, expedient for others and for 
himself. But that it was really inexpedient we know, be- 
cause we know that, by the divine law, it was unequivocally 
forbidden. , 

What the future history of France would have been if Henry 
had clung to his integrity, is known only to the Omniscient ; 
but, with the annals of France in our hands, we have no diffi- 
culty in perceiving that the day of his impious, because pre- 
tended conversion, was among the dies nefasti of his country. 

It restored peace, indeed, to that bleeding land, and it gave 
to himself an undisputed reign of seventeen years ; but he 
found them years replete with cares and terrors, and disgraced 
by many shameful vices, and at last abruptly terminated by 
the dagger of an assassin. It rescued France, mdeed, from 
the evils of a disputed succession, but it consigned her to two 
centuries of despotism and misgovernment. It transmitted the 
crown, indeed, to seven in succession of the posterity of Henry, 
but of them one died on the scaffold, three were deposed by 
insurrections of their subjects, one has left a name pursued by 
unmitigated and undying infamy, and another lived and died 
in a monastic melancholy, the feeble slave of his own minis- 
ter. The grandson of Henry, Louis XIV., amid the splendors 
which surrounded him, may appear to have been a brilliant 
exception from the dark fatality which waited on the other 
sovereigns of the house of Bourbon ; but even he, by the licen- 
tiousness of his personal habits, by the arbitrary system of his 
government, by his wild extravagance, by his iniquitous wars, 
and by his remorseless persecutions, paved the downward path 
to the ruin of his name, of his dynasty, and of his race. If 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 455 

any proplietic voice could have disclosed to Henry the events 
really depending on his purchase of his crown by apostasy, 
would that purchase have been made ? If he had sought for 
guidance in the sacred book, which was the corner-stone of 
the faith he abandoned, would it not have reminded him that 
" the lip of truth shall be established forever, but that a lying 
tongue is but for a moment ?" 

It must not, however, be forgotten, that one of the results 
of Henry's renunciation of the Reformed faith was glorious 
to himself, and was, for a time, eminently advantageous to his 
people. It enabled him, in April, 1598, to promulgate the 
Edict of Nantes — ^the great charter of Protestantism in France. 
It commenced by an acknowledgment that Grod was adored 
and worshiped by all the French people, if not in the same 
forms, yet with the same intentions ; and it was then declared 
to be a perpetual and irrevocable law, the chief foundation of 
the union and tranquillity of the state — First, that all men 
should enjoy, in private, full liberty of conscience. Secondly, 
that the free public celebration of the Protestant worship should, 
in all future times, be permitted in every place in which it had 
been actually celebrated, immediately before the date of that 
edict. Thirdly, that all superior lords might hold meetings for 
public worship within the precincts of their chateaux, and that 
every inferior gentleman might receive as many as thirty vis- 
itors at his domestic worship. Fourthly, that the Protestants 
should participate in all the benefits of public erhployments, 
schools, hospitals, and charities. Fifthly, that they should pos- 
sess five academies for the education of youth. Sixthly, that 
they might convene and hold national synods ; and, seventhly, 
that they should occupy several fortified cities, for securing to 
them the faithful observance of these concessions. That they 
were ill observed is indeed true, and that at length the grand- 
son of Henry revoked his "perpetual and irrevocable" law is 
also true. Yet, during eighty-seven years, it remained the 
measure and the rule, if not the effectual bulwark, of the rights 
of the Protestant population of France. 

How, then (to resume the question with which I commenced 
my last preceding lecture), did it happen, that the protest made 
by so large a part of that population against the spiritual tyr- 
anny of the Roman Church was not followed by any effectual 



456 THE REFORMATION AND 

resistance to the despotism of the Bourbon Dynasty ? The de- 
tails with which I have hitherto detained you will now, I trust, 
enable me to bring into a narrow compass my answer to that 
inquiry. 

That answer in general is, that the Reformation was unpro- 
ductive of civil liberty in France, because the Reformed Church 
in that country was never able to attain to more than a tem- 
porary and precarious toleration. The more precise answer, 
in my judgment at least, is, that this ill success is to be at- 
tributed to the eight following causes : 

First. The Calvinistic type which Protestantism assumed 
in France was alien from the national character. While yet 
a novelty, indeed, it was also a fashion. To sing the hymns 
of Marot in the Pre-aux-Clercs, or to join the multitude which 
thronged the pulpit of Theodore Beza, was the mode in a coun- 
try where that capricious power has ever erected the chief seat 
of her dominion. But, ere long, the national spirit reasserted 
its indefeasible authority. Turning away from the cold, un- 
impressive worship of Greneva, the great, the noble, and the 
rich, followed by the crowd which usually follows them, joined 
again in theatrical processions to the shrines of their patron 
saints, and knelt as before around the altars, where the dra- 
matic solemnities of the mass were celebrated amid clouds of 
incense and strains of sacred harmony. In religion, as in ev- 
ery thing else, the craving of the French mind for spectacle, 
for representation, and for effect, is, and ever has been, insa- 
tiable. 

Secondly. The Calvinistic system was distinguished from 
that of all the other Reformed churches by the extent to which 
it rejected ecclesiastical tradition, and erected the whole super- 
structure of belief and worship on the Holy Scriptures, as in- 
terpreted by Calvin himself. Not content to sever those bonds 
which, reaching back to the most remote Christian antiquity, 
should hold together the churches of every age in one indis- 
soluble society, he imposed on his disciples, and on their spir- 
itual progeny in all future time, other bonds, wrought by him- 
self from his study of the Bible, and embracing the whole com- 
pass, not of theology alone, but of moral philosophy also. His 
Christian Institutes claimed and acquired for a season, in his 
Church, an empu-e resembling that which the logic and ethics 



THE WARS OP RELIGION. 457 

of Aristotle had so long enjoyed in the schools. But Calvin 
was not an Aristotle. His vivacious, inquisitive, skeptical fel- 
low-countrymen were not schoolmen. Ere many years had 
passed, they became impatient of the dogmatism even of their 
great patriarch himself. By attempting to hring all moral 
science within the sphere of theology, and hy converting sci- 
entific principles into articles of faith, he had exposed to the 
attacks of that ingenious and versatile people a long line of 
positions, many of which, even when found to be defenseless, 
could not be abandoned with safety to the rest. The reaction 
which took place hurried the insurgents from one extreme to 
the other. Servetus may be said to have at length obtained 
his revenge. The doctrines for which he died were widely dif- 
fused throughout the churches founded by the author of his 
death ; for, in the history of Calvinism in France, we have the 
most impressive of all illustrations of the truth, that no Chris- 
tian society can sever itself from the ancient and once univer- 
sal commonwealth of the Christian Church, except at the im- 
minent risk of sacrificing the essence of Christianity to the 
spirit of independence. The Socinianism of the later Protest- 
ant Church of France was at once the proof of its inherent 
weakness and the cause of its farther decline. 

Thirdly. The Reformation in France became comparative- 
ly barren of constitutional freedom and of its other legitimate 
fruits, because the Reformed Church there soon and widely de- 
parted from its appropriate character, to assume the office of a 
party in the state. The alliance of the Huguenots with the 
Politiques was fatal at once to the religious discipline of the 
former and to their personal sanctity. Their preachers fore- 
saw the contaminating influence of that association, and earn- 
estly, but vainly, dissuaded it. Thus the treaty of Milhau, of 
December, 1573, between the Protestants and Politiques, was 
little, if at all, less than a deliberate treason. Thus, also, the 
still more intimate connection between the Consistoriaux and 
the G-entilshommes, in the ranks of the Huguenots themselves, 
was formed at a grievous detriment to the severer virtues by 
which the early Reformers had been distinguished. It is the 
testimony of a writer of their own age and party, that the flame 
of piety among the Calvinists had been effectually extinguished 
by the dissolute and scandalous examples of their more world- 



458 . THE REFORMATION AND 

ly associates, and tliat deLauoliery advanced and overflowed 
among them far and wide, like an uncontrollable torrent. 

Fourthly. The virtue, and with it the energy and the suc- 
cess, of the Protestants was farther impaired by the seductions 
to which their chiefs and leaders were exposed from their too 
frequent contact with Catharine and her court. Rank, office, 
and all the other allurements of royal patronage were employed 
to shake their fidelity ; and Mezerai asserts that more Hugue- 
nots were converted in four years by these methods, than had 
been induced to abandon their religion in forty years by the 
terrors of the scaffold and of the sword. 

Fifthly. Even yet more fatal to the religious spirit, and, 
therefore, to the moral and political influence of the Hugue- 
nots, were the sanguinary habits they contracted during many 
years of civil warfare. The atrocities of that dark era were 
not confined to the Catholics. As the contest proceeded, the 
parties on either side became gradually bereft, not only of the 
spirit of Christianity, but of the feelings of our common hu- 
manity ; while the moral sense was paralyzed, if not deadened, 
by the sight and the perpetration of remorseless cruelties. To 
men stained with such crimes, however sorely provoked to the 
commission of them', it was not given to raise aloft the cross 
of the E-edeemer, and to announce the tidings of peace and 
reconciliation. By the lips of such heralds, even the G-ospel 
itself was proclaimed in vain. 

Sixthly. The relations between the Huguenot Church and 
the state being always those of antagonists, there subsisted 
between them no alliance to arrest that instability of religious 
opinions to which independent ecclesiastical bodies are so much 
addicted, or to infuse into the body politic those principles of 
social equality and of mental freedom by which the Protestant 
Churches are habitually distinguished. 

Seventhly. It was the error and the misfortune of the 
French Protestants to confide the conduct of their cause to the 
princes of the house of Bourbon. The first of them, Anthony 
of Navarre, deserted and betrayed it in the visionary hope that 
the Triumvirate would reward him by the exchange of his 
nominal crown for a real sovereignty. His brother, Louis de 
Conde, deserted and betrayed it in the persuasion that Catha- 
rine would confer upon him the office of lieutenant general of 



THE WARS OF RELIGION. 459 

France. The younger Conde deserted and betrayed it to res- 
cue his life from the assassins of St. Bartholomew. Henry IV. 
twice abjured the Protestant creed, first for the preservation of 
his life, and then for the preservation of his crown. These 
treacheries of the four Bourbons, whom the Huguenots fol- 
lowed in the civil wars, were only less fatal to their interests 
than the unrelenting persecutions of the three Bourbons, who 
successively occupied the French throne between the death of 
Henry lY. and the accession of Louis XVI. For, 

Eighthly. It is to the persecutions to which the Protestants 
were exposed, from the time of their first appearance in the 
city of Meaux till the near approach of the French Revolution, 
that we must chiefly ascribe their failure to acquire the author- 
ity and influence necessary to their propagation of constitution- 
al liberty in France. The story of these persecutions, so mer- 
ciless, so unrelenting, and so continuous, fills vast volumes 
which have been dedicated to the memory of the sufferers by 
the martyrologists of their own party. It is a story which no 
man would either willingly read, or repeat, or even abbreviate. 
It exhibits our common nature in its most offensive aspect. It 
pervades every era of the French annals. It assumes every 
conceivable form of cruelty and injustice, and many forms in- 
conceivable to the darkest imagination, unaided by an actual 
knowledge of those horrible details. If the most terrific act of 
this prolonged tragedy was the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
the most revolting was the Dragonnades of Louis XIV. Cath- 
arine and her son had at least the excuse of believing that the 
enemies they destroyed were dangerous to their own safety, 
and their offense was not committed under the veil of any em- 
inent devotion. Madame de Maintenon and her husbaiid, on 
the other hand, neither felt, nor affected to feel, any drcirl of 
the myriads of helpless victims whom they impoverished, ban- 
ished, imprisoned, and destroyed. But it was at the bidding 
of their confessors — with the cordial support of their priest- 
hood — with prayers continually on their lips — and in the name 
of the Prince of Peace, that they daily offered up these human 
sacrifices. The blood of the martyrs has, indeed, been the seed 
of the Church, but not when the hearts of the persecutors have 
been sufficiently steeled against all lassitude, compunction, and 
remorse. In almost every part of Europe, which at this day 



460 POWEH OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

acknowledges the spiritual dominion of tlie Papacy, tlie sword, 
the scourge, the brand, and the ax, wielded by the secular pow- 
ers, under the guidance of their spiritual advisers, have effect- 
ually arrested the progress of the Reformation. In France, 
those weapons were but too successfully employed, by the 
houses of Valois and of Bourbon, to crush religious liberty, 
and with it to eradicate the seeds of constitutional freedom. 
But they were also, however, unconsciously employed to pre- 
pare the way for the convulsions by which two whole genera- 
tions of mankind have been unceasingly agitated, and by which 
the Capetian Dynasty has again and again been subverted from 
its once immovable foundations. 



LECTURE XVII. 

ON THE POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

At the commencement of these lectures, I observed that it 
was the high office of History to trace out the progress of pub- 
lic opinion in molding the character and the condition of the 
nations ; and I added that to indicate some of the steps of that 
progress in France was the arduous task which I had ventured 
to propose to myself. It is, indeed, a task so arduous, that I 
ought, perhaps, to apologize for undertaking it at all. The lei- 
sure and the studies of a whole life would scarcely be sufficient 
for following the course of a few only of the many confluent 
streams by which the current of opinion was fed and swollen, 
as it shaped out the destinies of the French people. Who, in- 
deed, shall undertake, with any confidence, to determine what 
were the political views, or what the moral sentiments, most 
widely diffused among them at each successive epoch of their 
national life ? Or who will pretend to such skill in the science 
of moral analytics as to be able to resolve into their elements 
the motives by which they were actuated, or the judgments by 
which they were guided, at even any one solitary period of the 
long centuries of their political existence ? If the secrets of 
any single bosom baffle the keenest human scrutiny, how may 
we hope to penetrate the mysteries of those great social move- 



POAVER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 4Gi 

merits, in the production of which the wills of myriads, if not 
of millions, of independent agents were concurring ? 

I answer, that all we can expect, and perhaps all that we 
can desire, is to approximate to the true solution of these enig- 
mas ; and that, though nothing less than Omniscience can 
completely resolve them, yet the faculties intrusted to ordinary 
men may be suificient to ascertain both what have been the 
predominant propensities of a great people during the growth 
and development of their power, and in what sources such na- 
tional characteristics have chiefly originated. The foremost 
minds of France have at all times been not only the zealous 
authors, but the faithful interpreters also, of the thoughts and 
purposes of their successive generations. In the darkest not 
less than in the brightest seasons, a voice exhorting, guiding, 
and. animating the French people was ever raised — by the 
Church, through her ministers and in her ministrations — ^by 
the Parliaments, through their illustrious magistrates — by the 
States- G-eneral, through their patriotic leaders — -and especially 
by Literature, through those master spirits who labored, from 
one age to another, to enrich, to accumulate, and to transmit 
the intellectual patrimony of their own and of all succeeding 
times. It was, indeed, a voice which gave utterance to many 
discordant lessons ; sometimes inculcatirig either the sacred 
truths and laws of our most holy faith, or the received doctrines 
of moral a!nd political philosophy, or the sense of honor, or the 
love of country ; and, on other occasions, teaching either a fatal 
Pyrrhonism, or an insatiable thirst for military glory and ag- 
grandizement, or inexorable national antipathies, or ignoble 
superstitions, or religious errors. But whatever might be the 
teaching of those whom, at successive epochs, France acknowl- 
edged as her spiritual and mental rulers, that teaching was 
never really ineffectual. It gradually molded the mind of her 
people, and governed their resolutions. It fostered, when it 
did not create, in them much of that traditional character, at 
once so admirable in its beauties, and in its deformities so re- 
volting. The husbandry bestowed on the hearts and on the 
understandings of Frenchmen has ever been prolific of an abun- 
dant harvest. Their faults are not, and never have been, those 
of men abandoned to the untutored instincts and brute appe- 
tites of nature. Even in the wildest paroxysms of revolution 



462 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

and "bloodshed, they have, for example, invariably and passion- 
ately maintained that the commonwealth is constituted, not 
for the advancement of material interests merely, but for 
higher and nobler, though too often, indeed, for impracticable 
ends. They have frequently been subjected to the tyranny of 
the imagination. Sheer nonsense, in the masquerade of sub- 
lime abstractions, has continually ruled over them. They have 
bowed down to other tyrannies far baser and more oppressive 
than those ; but, as a people, they have never taken Mammon 
for their Grod. They have not allowed the cares of life to an- 
nihilate its healthful illusions, or to poison its blameless de- 
lights. They have ever rendered a voluntary or an unconscious 
allegiance to those dominant minds of their nation, who have 
ruled by force of reason or eloquence, of wit or genius, justly 
or unjustly ascribed to them by the suffrages of the multitude. 
He, therefore, who would interpret the fate of the dynasties 
and of the people of France, must study her political by the 
light of her ecclesiastical, forensic, and literary history. I 
need scarcely disavow an}^ such ambitious purpose. My aim 
is far more humble. I design merely to throw out some pass- 
ing suggestions on the influence exercised over the civil gov- 
ernment and polity of that kingdom, not either by the Church, 
the Parliaments, or the States-General, nor even by Literature 
in general, but by some eminent men of letters. Among the 
countless authors to whose labors that influence may be more 
or less truly referred, I shall select a few only ; but those few 
will be such as, from time to time, attained to a literary su- 
premacy in their native land. To notice the rest is to me, at 
least, as impossible as it would be superfluous ; for all the 
writers who have in turns been elevated to the dictatorship of 
the Republic of Letters in France have a family resemblance, 
which attests their mental consanguinity. By means of that 
resemblance, their descent may be readily traced. Theirs is a 
lineage which, commencing with the patriarchs of remote ages, 
is perpetuated in the Gruizots, the Cousins, and the Lamartines 
of our own days. If we can seize the generic character of that 
imperial race, we shall sufficiently understand the nature of 
the impulses which, in successive ages, they have given to 
public opinion, partly by their own personal exertions, and 
partly by those of their imitators and disciples. 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 403 

The literature of France is of a mncli earlier date than 
French literature. From the days of Charlemagne to those of 
St. Louis, a long series of French authors traversed the whole 
circle of the sciences ; hut they employed for that purpose, not 
French, but either classical, or scholastic, or rustic Latin. It 
is, indeed, only in deference to a national prejudice, as un- 
founded as it is inveterate, that I place Charlemagne and his 
learned courtiers among Frenchmen. The founders of each 
of the two imperial dynasties were both aliens from France. 
Charlemagne was in every sense of the word a G-erman, as 
Napoleon was, in almost every sense, an Italian ; and the 
school over which Alcuin presided at Aix-la-Chapelle was no 
more Grallican, than the academy founded by Richelieu at 
Paris was Teutonic. 

The rustic Latin (or E-oman, as it was called) of France 
was scarcely the same language to the north and to the south 
of the Loire. It was ingrafted by the victorious Romans, 
after the age of Caesar, on the aboriginal tongues spoken on 
either side of that river. But in Caesar's time those tongues 
were themselves widely dissimilar. In the Celtic and Belgic 
provinces of Graul there then prevailed different dialects of that 
widely-diffused speech which is at this day in use in Ireland, 
in "Wales, in the north of Scotland, and in Brittany. In Aqui- 
taine, on the other hand, both the vocabulary and the gram- 
mar were, at that period, Iberian rather than Grallio. There, 
also, the Grreek of Marseilles and of the adjacent Ionian col- 
onies, and the Arabic of the Saracenic invaders, each in turn 
left copious and rich deposits, both of words and of construc- 
tions ; and the half-civilized Groths of Aquitaine contributed 
far more than the barbarous Franks of Neustrasia or Austra- 
sia to ennoble and enlarge the popular speech of the nations 
among which they had respectively settled. For these rea- 
sons, and for others which I can not now pause to mention, 
the rustic Latin of the North was a comparatively meagre and 
unformed tongue, while the rustic Latin of the South was a 
tongue comparatively affluent, graceful, and expressive. The 
northern variety passed into modern French. The southern 
or Romance dialect became the language of poetry and of the 
Troubadours. It was at length swept away under the deso- 
lating crusades which so nearly exterminated the populations 
of Provence and Languedoc. 



464 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

I do not turn aside from my path to attempt any estimate 
of the influence of the Romance poetry on the character and 
polity of the French people, partly hecause that poetry is sig- 
nalized by no one great and imperishable Avork, and partly 
because the problem has been so recently and so completely 
solved by M. Fauriel in his Histoire de la Poesie Provenqale. 
He is one of those writers of whom his country may be justly 
proud. Under a weight of erudition, beneath which most men 
would stagger, he moves with the graceful ease which might 
seem to belong only to the lighter sports of fancy ; while all 
the comprehensive and intricate principles at his command are 
evolved with that exquisite skill, the distinctive character of 
which is to hide itself in its own perfection. M. Fauriel is of 
course an enthusiast in his pursuit, for that was necessary to 
the success of it ; but his enthusiasm has, unhappily, too 
much the mastery of him. He has always a smile, if not 
an apology, at hand for the moral delinquencies of his heroines 
and his heroes ; and is, I think, never once moved to reprobate 
that systematic contempt for conjugal fidelity by which the 
amatory strains he celebrates are habitually warmed and ani- 
mated. I fully admit that the provinces of the moralist and 
of the critic are not the same ; but I can not admit that any 
man, and least of all that any man of genius, may, with im- 
punity to his own mind, or without injury to the minds of 
others, treat with indifference, even in his critical capacity, 
the eternal distinctions between good and evil. 

In proportion to our reverence for that sacred priesthood 
who, by eucharistic sacrifices of half-inspired verse, celebrate 
from one generation to another the works and ways of the 
Creator, joining, each according to his vocation and his gifts, 
in the unbroken chorus of meditation, of love, of gladness, or 
of resignation which perpetually ascends from earth to heav- 
en — in that same proportion will, I believe, be our distaste for 
the lyrics of the Troubadours. I know not, indeed, of any so- 
cial phenomena more remarkable than that there should have 
been found in any country a constant succession of men, and 
of men of no vulgar stamp, who, during more than a century 
and a half, sang their life-long changes on the same narrow 
round of amatory thoughts and fancies ; and that, throughout 
all that time, such bards should have still found a ceaseless 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 465 

throng of admirers to follow and to extol tliem. Not even the 
magic of M. Fauriel's style seems to me sufficient to rescue 
the perusal of his specimens of these interminable love-songs 
from disgust and lassitude. The spirit they breathe is so 
false, fictitious, and artificial, that their grace and wit are in- 
sufficient (at least in my judgment) to redeem them from 
aversion, and even from contempt. On a former occasion I 
hazarded the opinion that the connection was neither fortui- 
tous nor obscure, but providential and significant, between the 
national character to which the Provencjale poetry bears wit- 
ness, and the destruction of the race for whose delight it was 
written, and by whose applauses it was rewarded. 

But while in Southern France the most cultivated intellects 
were whiling away their existence under the narcotic influ- 
ence of such strains as these, accompanied as they were by all 
the embellishments of music and the dance, a far sterner dis- 
cipline was preparing the cultivators of letters in the North 
for that momentous controversy which was to be carried on 
there in the twelfth century, upon some of those great ques- 
tions which the most closely affect the present duties of man- 
kind and their eternal prospects. The preparation for that 
debate had been made long before by many illustrious schol- 
ars of the Benedictine order, and especially by one of them, 
whose name I can not pass over in silence, although his writ- 
ings have long since been laid aside and forgotten. 

About the middle of the tenth century was living, at the 
monastery of St. Grerauld, in Auvergne, a youth, of whose fu- 
ture eminence the abbot of that house had formed the highest 
hopes. His name was G-erbert ; and, for the completion of his 
studies, the abbot (in what we should now call the spirit of an 
extreme liberality) sent him to Seville and Cordova, Avhere 
Arabian teachers instructed their pupils in geometry, astron- 
omy, arithmetic, and algebra. From those celebrated schools, 
Grerbert returned to France to earn the reputation of a sorcer- 
er. That he was concerting with Satan some unhallowed de- 
signs which the heart of man ought not to conceive, and which 
the tongue of man could not utter, was a belief not unnatu- 
rally drawn from the mysterious characters, the cabalistic 
signs, the groups of constellations, and the lines sloping in all 
directions, and meeting at all angles, which his hand was con- 



466 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

tinually tracing. Or, if any reasonable doubt had existed, 
who could resist conviction when informed, as the world was 
widely informed, that Avhile Grerhert was predicting all future 
events, and ascertaining all that had passed in former times, 
foul demons, in the form of gigantic bats, had been seen to 
envelop him in their sable wings. 

And yet Grerbert rose to be first a minister in the cathedral 
church of Rheims, and then to be archbishop of that see. But 
his love of knowledge was insatiable, and to indulge it he re- 
signed his mitre, and visited the schools of Italy. There his 
fame reached the ears of the emperor, Otho the G-reat, by whose 
influence he became Archbishop of Ravenna ; until at length, 
under the name of Silvester II., he ascended the papal throne. 
The belief in his magical powers seems to have gathered 
strength by this last advancement ; and, as far as can now be 
ascertained or conjectured, it must be confessed that the spells 
by which he wrought were indeed marvelous. An eloquent 
and pathetic writer, he stirred up the Pisans to the first expe- 
dition ever undertaken by the powers of the west for the de- 
fense of the pilgrims visiting the Holy Sepulchre. He studied 
and wrote upon antiquities, poetry, grammar, and logic. He 
is said to have taught the use of lofty and sharp-pointed poles 
as lightning conductors ; and he was the author of many 
books, which are reported to be still m the Royal Library of 
Paris. One of these, called Rythmomachia, is described as 
containing a comparison between the Arabic numerals and the 
algebraic symbols, as far as relates to their respective uses, 
functions, and powers. In another we are told that he ex- 
plained, geometrically, the science of harmonics, the structure 
of clocks, and the various methods of working the keys of the 
organ by water or by wind. Of his private life, nothing, I be- 
lieve, is recorded. But enough remains to show that, in that 
dark age, there was one Frenchman who had the heroism to 
cherish, and the genius to -execute, the design of combining 
in his own person a two-fold supremacy, and of reigning at 
once over the ecclesiastical and the scientific commonwealths 
of Christendom. 

In the twelfth century, however, the darkness of those times 
was to pass away. In that memorable age' may be discerned 
the budding of the most prolific of those ideas, which were to 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 467 

yield their fruit at the era of the Reformation and of the re- 
vival of letters. Commerce and the arts, philosophy and lit- 
erature, then hegan to emerge from the shadows by which 
they had heen so long enveloped. Then was the period of 
transition from the mediaeval barbarism to the modern civili- 
zation — the crisis at which light and ordei first began to pene- 
trate and to organize the preceding chaos. It was in that 
dawn of the intellectual and social renovation of a yet distant 
period that France first asserted her claim to be the chief in- 
strument of Providence in civilizing the European world. Her 
own monarchy had now become firmly settled in the Capetian 
race. She had taken the chief conduct of the Eastern cru- 
sades — the stormy source, as we have seen, of personal free- 
dom, of political and military organization, of commerce, and 
of learning. Her name had become familiar and formidable 
throughout the limits of the ancient empire ; and her arms 
had already diffused, beyond her own shores, some knowledge 
of her language. It was still, however, imperfectly formed, 
and was unfit (at least in the judgment of her greatest men) 
for literary uses. -The rustic Latin of the South had indeed 
been dedicated to such uses by the Troubadours ; but in the 
Nortli, the rustic Latin, or French, was still superseded by the 
Latin of ancient Rome, as often as men sought to impart or to 
acquire learning or philosophy, whether theological or secular. 
The throne of philosophy was then filled by a Frenchman, 
whose name has ever since occupied one of the foremost places 
in the literary annals of France. William, the son of a peas- 
ant of Champeaux, a town in Brie, was, in that age, a teacher 
of theology and logic to a crowd of students, who daily gath- 
ered round his chair in the cloisters of Notre Dame. Among 
them was a young Breton, whose short, feeble, and attenuated 
frame contrasted strangely with, a countenance of which the 
expression (enthusiastic and voluptuous by turns) seemed to 
announce an habitual conflict between his spiritual and his 
sensual nature. At one time he poured out, for the delight 
of his companions, songs of his own composition, or charmed 
them by his jovial mirth, or entranced them by his mellifluous 
colloquial eloquence. At another, he startled and repelled 
them by a manner vehement, unsocial, and abrupt. Though 
still young, he had traveled far ; passing, as a kind of philo- 



468 POWER OF THE PEN IN PRANCE. 

sophical Quixote, through, every land in which glory was to 
be won in dialectic tilts and tournaments. The youth, whose 
temperament was at once so joyous, and irritable, and aspir- 
ing, could not long submit himself to the authority of the 
grave Wilham of Champeaux. 

Abandoning his master, Abeillard, or Abelard (for such was 
the name won for him by his honeyed discourse), established 
first at Melun, and then at Corbeil, a school of his own, where, 
such was the throng, and such the eager curiosity of his pu- 
pils, that they were content, during the season of his lectures, 
to dwell in huts rudely composed of reeds and mud. "With 
characteristic self-reliance, Abelard commenced his academic 
course by declaring war on the doctrines of his former master ; 
and as William of Champeaux had taught Realism, he an- 
nounced himself as a devoted opponent of that doctrine. From 
Corbeil he returned to Paris ; and there, taking his place on 
the mount, and in the gardens of Ste. Grenevieve, he is said to 
have explained, to no less than 3000 scholars, each in turn of 
the philosophical systems of his age. 

But pbilosophy was not his only pursuit. Fulbert, a canon 
of the Church of Paris, inhabited a house in one of the islands 
of the Seine, where dwelt with him his niece Loise, or Heloise ; 
a damsel who, ailthough she had not yet completed her seven- 
teenth year, was passionately devoted to the pursuit of such 
knowledge as was then held in the highest esteem in the world 
of letters. At the mature age of forty, Abelard, then in holy 
orders, became the guest of Fulbert, and the teacher and se- 
ducer of Eloise. With virtue they abandoned tranquillity and 
peace ; and the revolting tale, on which romance and poetry 
have lavished so many meretricious ornaments, is not an idle 
fiction, but a melancholy truth. 

In his subsequent seclusion, first at the Oratory of the Par- 
aclete, and then at St. G-ildas, in Brittany, Abelard resumed 
the office of a prselector, and became the great interpreter, in 
France, of the philosophical ideas of his own generation. In 
common with the other schoolmen of that day, it was his office 
to analyze the truths of Holy Writ by the logic of Aristotle, 
and to explicate them by the aid of Aristotle's moral and meta- 
physical doctrines. He was also the author of some books, of 
which a full account may be seen in the twelfth volume of the 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 469 

Histoire Litteraire de France. The most remarkable of them 
are said to he the "Hexameron," an allegorical review of the 
creation, and of the order of the material universe ; and a hook 
on self-knowledge, in which the author is charged with having 
taught, in its vilest form, the Epicurean opmion that the soul 
is exempt from all taint and all responsibility, whatever may- 
be the excesses of the merely animal appetites. 

I know nothing of the truth or falsehood of that imputation, 
for the book in question is not contained in the only series of 
the works of Abelard with which I have any acquaintance. 
I refer to the collection of them which was published in 1836 
by M. Cousin, under the authority of M. Gruizot, then the min- 
ister of public instruction in France, and which first made 
known to the world two of the most remarkable and charac- 
teristic of Abelard's writings. 

I have said that he was a devoted opponent of Realism ; but 
you will not suppose that I am about to deviate into that great 
controversy. I advert to Abelard's contribution to it chiefly 
as illustrative of the remarks which I shall hereafter have to 
make on the identity of the spirit of the most eminent philos- 
ophers of France, in ages the most remote from each other. 
How much there was in common between Abelard and his 
great successors, Montaigne, Bayle, and Blaise Pascal, may, 
however, be in some measure inferred, even from the following 
brief notice of his war with the Realists. 

In his essay " De G-eneribus et Speciebus," Abelard ascribes 
to his master, "William of Champeaux, and generally to the 
Realists of his times, a doctrine, which may, perhaps, be suf- 
ficiently understood from the following specimen or illustration 
of it, with which he amused his readers and himself. 

Like all other universals, Humanity is a thing essentially 
one and indivisible. If to that one thing there accedes a cer- 
tain congeries of forms, the result is to produce the individual 
man, Socrates. The accession to Humanity of another assem- 
blage of forms produces the man Plato. The Socratic forms 
and the Platonic forms may be totally dissimilar ; but beneath 
that diversity of species is veiled an absolute identity of genus. 
The same universal man lives in both, though he be enveloped 
in each by different integuments. 

To this doctrine, or rather to tliis illustration of the Realist 



470 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRAN.CE. 

dootrine, Abelard answers : " First. If Plato be at Rome, and 
Socrates at Athens, then the universal man, who is common 
to them both, must be at the same moment at Athens and at 
Rome ; that is, he must be in two places at once. 

Secondly. The universal man, who has taken to himself 
the forms of Socrates, is inseparable from those forms. "Wher- 
ever that universal man is, there also, consequently, must 
Socrates be. Therefore Socrates is at the same moment at 
Athens, and at every other place at which the universal man 
is present, under the forms of any other individual than Soc- 
rates himself. 

Thirdly. " As the universal man is the latent substratum of 
the forms of all individual men, it follows that wherever any 
man is found, there also is to be found every man. Indeed it 
is evident that there is, after all, but one man in the world, 
who is appearing at each moment in some hundreds of millions 
of dissimilar aspects, and in as many separate places. 

Fourthly. As the Socratic and the Platonic forms accede 
to and embrace, not merely the universal man, but also the 
universal animal, it is evident that if that animal be sick in 
Socrates, he must at the same time be sick in Plato ; and so, 
if there be any one sick man, the whole world must be one 
vast hospital. 

Finally. Seeing that the universal animal, under the spe- 
cies of certain living things, is rational, and, under the species 
of other living things, is irrational, and yet is alike enveloped, 
and alike alive in each of those things, there is no escaping the 
consequence that every animal is at once rational and irrational. 

The argumentum a cachinatione in this case, as in most 
cases, proves little more than the vivacity of him who uses it. 
The Yoltaire of the twelfth century, like his great antitype of 
the eighteenth, was, however, not content to laugh down sys- 
tems of belief without building up others in their room. But, 
while contending with Realism, he was unwilling to espouse 
the antagonist theory of the Nominalists, or to assert with them 
that all universals, Humanity for example, or Animality, were 
mere words. In the judgment of his age, and, I suppose, in 
his own judgment, that doctrine was irreconcilably opposed to 
many articles of the creed of the Church. That it was really 
opposed to the article of transubstantiation seems indeed to ad- 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 471 

mit of no doubt whatever. Every consistent Roman Catliolic 
is a Realist. To avoid the reproach of heresy, therefore, or 
perhaps for yet better reasons, Abelard devised that compro- 
mise between the contending parties to which metaphysicians 
have given the name of " Conceptionism." If universals were 
neither real entities nor mere words, they must be so many 
conceptions of the mind. Even, therefore, if it be admitted 
that there is no substantive reality except in individuals, yet 
between different individuals there are various resemblances 
and analogies which the mind observes and classifies. To the 
classes so formed, and to them alone, Abelard maintained that 
the characters either of genera or of species properly belonged. 

M. Cousin, who has most luminously explained this compro- 
mise, thinks that, by means of it, Abelard rather evaded than 
solved the difficulty ; and that, either unconsciously or covert- 
ly, he was to the last, in the proper sense of the word, a Nom- 
inalist. I do not presume to express an opinion on this very 
subtle question ; but from Abelard's treatise, called " Sic et 
Non," I can not but surmise that, though the supposed tend- 
ency of Nominalism to subvert the foundations of the Christian 
faith might render him very reluctant to avow himself a Nom- 
inalist, it might not really much indispose him to the accept- 
ance of that philosophy. 

The words " sic et non" might, perhaps, be best rendered 
into English by our homely phrase See-saiv. The Benedic- 
tines, and especially the excellent and learned D'Achery, had 
a copy of the book, which they laid aside as unfit for publica- 
tion. I respect the firmer faith in the invulnerability of truth, 
which has induced M. Cousin to give it to the world, as I ad- 
mire the charity with which that most eminent philosopher 
would reconcile Abelard's character as a sincere Christian and 
an honest man with his publication of such a treatise. M. Cou- 
sin regards it as a collection of theological problems or contra- 
dictions, designed to fortify the mind by a salutary skepticism 
against the acceptance of any narrow and precipitate solutions, 
and so to prepare it for solutions of a more solid and durable 
nature. " The skepticism of Abelard," says his editor, "was 
merely provisional. He proposed, at some later period, to rec- 
oncile the contradictions which he thus brought together, and, 
by the power of logic, to reclaim men from doubt to faith and 



472 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

orthodoxy." That such was the real though unavowed design, 
it is, at least pleasant to believe, and who would refuse him- 
self that pleasure when assured by such a critic that he may 
legitimately indulge it. But, apart from that assurance, I con- 
fess that I should have thought that, in this case, a less favor- 
able conclusion was inevitable. 

In the Prologus of the " Sic et Non," Abelard insists on the 
difficulty of rightly understanding either the Scriptures or the 
Fathers, and he traces it to eight distinct causes. These are, 
first, the peculiarities of their style ; secondly, their employ- 
ment, on scientifio subjects, not of scientific, but of popular 
language ; thirdly, the corruption of the text ; fourthly, the 
number of spurious books ; fifthly, the frequent retractations 
by the Fathers of their own previous statements ; sixthly, their 
careless use of their profane learning ; seventhly, their habit 
of describing things, not as they really are, but as they appear, 
and as they are supposed by the vulgar to be ; and, eighthly, 
their repeated use of the same words in two or more diiTerent 
senses. He advises that, when the apparent contradictions of 
the Scriptures can not be explained by any of these considera- 
tions, we should abandon the manuscripts as inaccurate, and 
that we should draw a broad distinction between the canonical 
Scriptures, " in which every thing is of necessity true," and 
all other ecclesiastical writings — between the apostolical and 
all other scriptures — and between the sacred text and all com- 
ments upon it. 

Then, proceeding to establish the existence of these alleged 
contradictions, Abelard proposes a series of questions ranging 
nearly over the whole compass of theology and morals, and sets 
himself to show, under each, that opposite or inconsistent an- 
swers to it may be drawn from the Holy Scriptures, or from 
the Fathers, or from both. Of those questions the following 
are examples : 

" Q,uod non sit Deus singularis ; et contra. Quod sit Deus 
tripartitus ; et contra. Q,uod sit filius sine principio ; et con- 
tra. Q,uod nihil fiat casu ; et contra. Quod peccata etiam 
placeant Deo ; et non. Quod omnia possit Deus ; et non. 
Quod creatura sit adoranda ; et non. Quod nulla de causa 
mentiri liceat ; et contra," &o., &o. 

On the manner in which the task of arraying scriptural 



POAVER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 473 

against scriptural, patristic against patristic, authority is thus 
accomphshed, I offer no remark, except that the writer has ev- 
idently no scruple in asserting on any grounds, however slight, 
the actual existence of such a conflict. M. Cousin observes 
that, under the encumbrance of quotations and precautions, 
both the thoughts and the style of Abelard falter ; but adds 
that, as he emerges from these defiles, and approaches the end 
of his work, he resumes his force and freedom, until at length 
he loudly proclaims his cardinal principle, that doubt is the 
true key to wisdom : " Dubitando enim ad inquisitionem ve- 
nimus, inquirendo veritatem percipimus." 

Notwithstanding the almost irresistible weight of M. Cou- 
sin's judgment, I confess myself (as, indeed, I have already said) 
to be unconvinced of the sincerity of Abelard's loud avowals 
of an implicit faith in the Scriptures. If we look rather to the 
evident tendency than to the categorical expressions of his 
book, it seems to me nothing else than an anticipation of the 
style in which many French, and not a few English, writers 
have conducted, and are still conducting, their assaults on 
Christianity. No one can have much acquaintance with the 
literature of either country who is ignorant that it is among 
the common artifices of the more recent enemies of our faith 
to assert their implicit acceptance of its credentials ; to under- 
take an orthodox interpretation of many passages of its sacred 
canon ; and even to set themselves to refute objections to its 
truth ; taking good care, however, in their assumed office of 
Christian advocates, to throw into their statement of those ob- 
jections the accumulated weight of their learning, and the 
whole force of their reasoning powers. 

To the " Dubitando ad inquisitionem, inquirendo veritatem" 
of Abelard, a voice of incomparably greater force and eloquence 
even than his answered from the eastern frontiers of France 
in apostolic language : " Animalis Homo non percipit ea quae 
sunt Spiritus Dei. Stultitia enim est ei ; et non potest intel- 
ligere, quia spiritualiter examinaturP It was the voice of 
Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the noblest, and certainly the 
most persuasive, of all those imperial spirits who have success- 
ively contributed to mold the intellectual and moral character 
of his and their native country. 

In the year 1100, Robert, a monk of the order of St, Bene- 



474 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

diet, establislied a religious brotlierliood at Oiteaux, whicli was 
at that time a waste or forest on the confines of Champagne 
and Burgundy. Under his directions, an oratory, with a group 
of surrounding cottages, were erected there for that branch of 
the great Benedictine family which afterward derived from the 
place the distinctive designation of Cistercian. Within ten 
years Robert had been succeeded in the government of the 
monastery by St. Stephen Harding, an Englishman, under 
whose guidance the monks, as we are assured by their annal- 
ist, labored with the most austere self-discipline to regain the 
sacred image in which our race was originally created. They 
found it, indeed, a rugged path ; for, while their brethren of 
the princely house of Cluny denounced their ascetic practices 
as schismatical innovations, disease was hurrying one after 
another of the new fraternity to premature graves. 

Much perplexed to discover why it pleased the Supreme 
Disposer of events so to afflict the most devoted of his wor- 
shipers, St. Stephen (so runs the accepted legend), as he stood 
by the couch of one of his dying followers, commanded him, 
in the name of holy obedience, to return, after his death, to 
Citeaux, with such intelligence as he might be able to obtain 
in the world of departed spirits as to the Divine pleasure re- 
garding the Cistercians, and as to the light in which it be- 
hooved them to consider their own scheme and manner of life. 
The monk died, and, I need scarcely add, revisited the abbey, 
bringing with him the welcome intelligence that the convent- 
•ual habits in use there were most acceptable to the Supreme 
Judge, and authorized to assure them that, ere long, they 
should see their oratory thronged with new brethren, of whom 
many should be great, many rich, and many noble, but who, 
after a temporary abode at Citeaux, should, like so many 
swarms of bees quitting their native hive, be dispersed on ev- 
ery side, receiving and imparting benedictions. Falling on 
their knees, the few survivors of the Cistercian brotherhood 
implored the fulfillment of this gracious promise ; and, while 
tjie prayer was yet on their lips, a procession was seen to ad- 
vance slowly through the forest to the gates of the monastery. 
It was preceded by Bernard, then a youth in his twenty-first 
year, whose commanding form and expressive countenance en- 
hanced the admiration due to his free and graceful bearinsf. 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 475 

Casting themselves at the feet of St. Stephen, Bernard and his 
companions demanded and obtained permission to perform 
their novitiate at Citeaux ; and then the joyful and now united 
companies joined in the sacred strain, "Rejoice, thou barren, 
that bearest not ; break forth and sing, thou that travailest 
not ; for the desolate hath many more children than she which 
hath an husband." 

Unless we refuse to listen at all to monastic stories, we 
must be content to receive them in the monastic style, and 
with the usual monkish embellishments. But the circum- 
stances which had moved Bernard to migrate to Citeaux, though 
scarcely less marvelous than these, are far more authentic. 

Elizabeth, the daughter of the Count of Montbar, bore to 
her husband Tecelin, the Lord of Fontaines, six sons, of whom 
Bernard was the third, and one daughter, to whom her parents 
gave the name of Humbeline. Tecelin was a great captain, 
and while he took the field at the head of his vassals, Elizabeth 
instilled into the minds of her children those sacred lessons 
which maternal love most effectually teaches. One after an- 
other of her sons, however, in due time, followed their father 
to the wars, Bernard alone being left to listen to the instruc- 
tions of his mother. They sank so deeply into his heart, that 
the kindly discipline of his childhood ripened into the philos- 
ophy of his declining years ; into that philosophy which dis- 
covers, in the exercise of love, the foundation of all our knowl- 
edge, either of divine or of human things. 

From the heavenward aspirations to which he was thus 
trained from infancy, Bernard derived that fascinating elo- 
quence which bound, as with an irresistible spell, every one 
with whom he was brought into communication. To such a 
mind as his, animated by such filial remembrances, it was nat- 
ural, and perhaps easy, in the very morning of life, to prefer, 
to all which this world has to promise, the cell and the aus- 
terities of an anchorite. Such seeming prodigies admit a very 
simple and familiar explanation. But to persuade all the mem- 
bers of his family to assume the same indissoluble fetters re- 
quired a power of persuasion, in which he probably never found 
a successful imitator, except, indeed, in the person of Angelique 
Arnauld, the illustrious abbess of Port Royal des Champs. In 
obedience to his voice, first G-auldry, count de Touillon, his 



476 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

uncle, a renowned soldier, exchanged his coat of mail for the 
monastic habit. Then Barthelemy, his brother, resigned, at 
his invitation, the service of the Duke of Burgundy for the 
life-long obscurity and privations of a convent. Andrew, an- 
other of his brothers, while listening to his words, had his eyes 
opened to see their mother smiling upon them from her abode 
in Paradise, and, laying down his sword, he consecrated the 
remainder of his days to prayer and meditation. G-uido, who 
was the eldest son of their parents, and the heir to the estates 
and honors of their house, rendered a still more impressive 
homage to the eloquence of his brother. Surrendering all his 
wealth and prospects, he even divorced himself from the wife 
of his youth, and joined the little band which acknowledged 
Bernard as their spiritual conductor. Grerard, the second of 
the sons of Tecelin and Elizabeth, strove, but strove in vain, 
to resist the universal fascination. And when this last victory 
had been won, Bernard, attended by Barthelemy, by Andrew, 
by Guido, and by G-erard, knelt before Tecelin to obtain his 
last blessing ere the separation should be completed, which 
was to leave the widowed father with no child to sustain the 
infirmities of his age except his daughter Humbeline, and 
Nivard his youngest son. 

The agony of that parting had just been endured, when, as 
the five young men were for the last time quitting their parent- 
al roof, Nivard met them, and, immediately joining his breth- 
ren, followed the steps of Bernard to the desert. Of thirty per- 
sons who accompanied him to Citeaux, six were thus members 
of his own family — ^his uncle and his brothers. Not long after, 
Humbeline also appeared at the gates of the abbey. She 
sought, it is said, to win back Bernard to the world which wor- 
shiped her, and which she at that time worshiped. The words 
interchanged between them were few, but those few words 
riveted on her inmost soul such convictions of the vanity of 
life as made her fly from it to the severe, but, as she now 
judged, the salutary and peaceful solitude of the cloister. De- 
serted by all his children, Tecelin himself at last sought, and, 
let us hope, did not seek in vain, for consolation, by submit- 
ting himself as a simple monk to the spiritual government of 
his own child, Bernard, then the Abbot of Clairvaux. 

Clairvaux, a fair valley, as the word implies, lies between 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 477 

the slopes of two opposite ranges of hills, at the distance of 
about twelve miles from the city of Bar-sur-Auhe. One of 
the promised swarms of conventual bees had migrated thither 
from Citeaux, under the guidance of Bernard, and there he 
passed the whole of his earthly pilgrimage, unless when either 
the extremity of disease, or his zeal for the interests of the 
Church, occasionally drew him to a distance. Except by such 
maladies and such journeys, the monotony of his monastic life 
was unbroken, and no skill in narrative could render the de- 
tail of it either interesting or really intelligible. It is almost 
superfluous to say that strains of unearthly music, audible to 
no ears but his, would sometimes rise and die away along the 
walls of his monastery ; that celestial visitants descended into 
his cell; that Benedict himself came from the abodes of the 
blessed to hold communion with his illustrious disciple ; and 
that she who was blessed above women, the very goddess of 
the place, not seldom presented herself there to the adoring eyes 
of her enraptured worshiper. Neither was there any lack of 
miracle. Paralysis and epilepsy disappeared at the bidding of 
the saint ; and, stranger still, by exclaiming excommunico eas, 
he caused the instant death of so vast a multitude of flies, who 
were interrupting the dedication of the church of Foigny, that, 
' says the chronicler, the attendants carried them out by shov- 
elsful. 

This biography of the cloister is at once so monotonous, and 
in effect at least, if not in design, so profane, that it may well 
excite our wonder that so many good men should have repeat- 
ed, and that so many sane men should have believed it. But 
not even the coarse handling of those who have undertaken to 
write the life of Bernard can reduce him to the level of a vul- 
gar hero of ecclesiastical romance. In the history of mankind 
there is no passage better attested, and none more worthy of 
diligent meditation, than that which exhibits him as exercis- 
ing, over the men of his own and of future times, a moral do- 
minion more enduring and more extensive than that of the 
greatest ecclesiastical or secular potentate — a dominion ac- 
quired by his own regenerate soul and magnificent understand- 
ing, without the aid of any temporal advantages or of any ex- 
ternal power, except, indeed, that power which he drew from 
his unceasing communion with the eternal fountain of holiness 
and of lisht. 



478 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

To US of tliis generation, it may appear inexplicable liow 
the ruler of a convent, erected by himself in a wilderness re- 
mote from cities, and seldom visited by even a solitary traveler, 
should attain to such authority, not only among his own nation, 
but throughout Europe at large. But, in the days of Bernard, 
while all other powers were separated from each other by wars, 
or ignorance, or by the dissolution of ancient kingdoms into 
petty fiefs, the clerical order was bound together by a closer 
and a firmer chain of mutual dependencies, and a more regu- 
lar subordination than at any preceding or subsequent period. 
Not only had the victories of Hildebrand and his immediate 
successors attached the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy with 
increased firmness to Rome, but the Benedictine order, as yet 
unrivaled by any new monastic institutes, formed a vast cor- 
poration, the affiliated societies of which, in every state and 
province, and almost in every canton of the Christian world, 
lived in constant intercourse with each other and with their 
common head. In that age, intelligence was diffused, opinion 
directed, and fame bestowed, partly by those Benedictine con- 
vents, and partly by the great schools of France and Italy. 
The accession of Bernard to their order, followed, as it was, 
by the conquest of all his kindred, was an event well calcu- 
lated to arrest the attention and to excite the curiosity of the 
dispensers of reputation in those times ; nor was he really 
concealed at Clairvaux from the personal notice of some of 
the most eminent of their number. 

"William of Champeaux, the teacher of Abelard, had by this 
time become bishop of Chalons, and, in the vacancy of the 
diocese of Langres, had officiated at the consecration of the 
monastery of Clairvaux. He found in the abbot a Realist 
quite as zealous as himself, but incomparably his superior in 
range of thought and energy of speech ; and when the bishop 
directed Bernard to preach in all the churches of the see of 
Chalons, the concourse, the delight, and the conversions of his 
hearers were such as to announce the appearance of another 
Chrysostom. 

Seven hundred years had then rolled away since the Church 
had been admonished or comforted by the voice of any of her 
Fathers. They had disappeared ; those venerable men who, 
amid the decay of all secular learning, had so long maintained 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 479 

the empire, not of religion alone, but of eloquence also — of 
literature, of philosophy, and of criticism. As age after age 
passed on, the Church, no longer accustomed to listen to that 
profound discourse and to those heart-searching exhortations, 
had ceased to anticipate the revival of them. To the men of 
the twelfth century, the language of Bernard, at once so ve- 
hement and so pathetic, came, therefore, not only with all the 
power of truth, but with all the force of novelty. It seemed 
to them as if Augustine had once more risen up to resume his 
ancient and undisputed sovereignty. They regarded their new 
apostle as one to whom such abundant disclosures had been 
made by the Father of lights, as rendered liimself a kind of 
living revelation. They venerated him as a saint, whose men- 
tal vision, unclouded by the dark veil of sense, ranged over all 
the awful realities of our present and our future existence. 
They believed that the faith by which he had overcome the 
world, as the foe of his own mental purity, was of power to 
overcome it, also, as the inveterate enemy of the everlasting 
Grospel. And bowmg down (as our race will ever bow down) 
before a mind which, in an absolute servitude to the Divine 
will, has regained and rejoices in its own native freedom, they 
exalted him to a moral dominion which, at the culminating 
point of his own greatness, either Julius or Charlemagne migjit 
have contemplated with envy. 

It was for these reasons, or for reasons such as these, that 
the Christian world referred to the arbitration of Bernard the 
rival pretensions of Innocent II. and of Anaclet II., each of 
whom was claiming the apostolic throne on the death of Ho- 
norius in 1130. Anaclet retained possession of Rome and of 
the other chief Italian cities. He had secured the support of 
Roger, the Norman duke of Sicily, by the double promise of 
exchanging his ducal coronet for a royal crown, and of bestow- 
ing on him the dignity of Patrician of R,ome. In Northern 
Italy, and especially in Milan, Conrad, of the house of Hohen- 
staufFen, a pretender to the empire, had numerous and active 
partisans, who accepted or courted the alliance of Anaclet ; 
and the ever-ready sympathy of the powerful duke and cities 
of Aquitaine with the free Italian republics, extended the in- 
terest of Anaclet throughout the whole of the south of France. 

It was in the north of that country that Innocent sought 



480 POAVER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

for spiritual subjects and for defenders. But Louis le Grros 
would neither take up arms in his support, nor undertake to 
determine whether he was, indeed, the lawful successor of St. 
Peter. For the decision of that arduous question, he summon- 
ed a national synod to assemble at Etampes, and himself met 
there in person the northern bishops, and all the greater abbots 
of the north. There, also, by the express command or invita- 
tion of the king, appeared the Abbot of Clairvaux. To him 
the assembly, with one voice, referred the preliminary investi- 
gation of this great controversy, as, with one voice, they after- 
ward assented to his judgment that Innocent was the true pope, 
and the lawful head upon earth of the Church of Christ. Louis, 
acquiescing in this sentence, immediately placed his kingdom 
under the obedience of Innocent, and Bernard became the pa- 
tron of his cause in all the other states of Europe. 

He enforced it successfully on the kings of England, Scot- 
land, Arragon, and Jerusalem, in letters conceived (to judge of 
them collectively from a single specimen) in a tone as authori- 
tative as had ever been assumed at the palace of the Lateran. 
To Lothaire, the G-erman emperor elect, Bernard addressed 
himself in person in Liege. But Lothaire refused to hear the 
voice of the charmer, charmed he never so wisely, unless the 
Pope would reward his adhesion by renouncing the long-dis- 
puted papal title to investiture ; and to such a sacrifice all the 
confederate powers of earth and hell could not have tempted 
or terrified the inexorable abbot. Yet defeat did not seem to 
be among the possibilities of his existence. Intelligence of the 
union between the partisans of Conrad and the followers of 
Anaclet arrived in time to induce Lothaire to waive this claim, 
and to join with Innocent in a common hostility against their 
common enemies. 

In William, duke of Aquitaine, Bernard next encountered 
a still more refractory antagonist than Lothaire. The chron- 
iclers of the age employ their darkest colors in their portrait 
of the duke. The least of the vices of which they accuse him 
is the habit of eating habitually, for his own share, as much 
as would have kept eight stout yeomen in health. His pas- 
times were still more offensive ; for, if we will believe his ac- 
cusers, he was accustomed to compel his vassals to fight like 
gladiators for his amusement. This G-argantua had, however, 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 481 

it seems, a heart in his bosom which once and again melted 
under the burning eloquence of Bernard, but which as often 
resumed its cold rigidity when that genial influence was with- 
drawn. At length (so runs the legend) the saint, having pro- 
nounced the awful words of consecration in a church in which 
"William was worshiping, descended the steps of the altar, his 
whole countenance glowing as with a radiant flame, and his 
uplifted hand sustaining the sacred elements as, approaching 
the obdurate duke, he thus addressed him : " Long have I 
entreated, and thou hast set at naught my entreaties. Many 
of the servants of G-od have joined their prayers to mine, and 
thou hast despised their prayers. Behold, now, the very Son 
of the Virgin — ^him whom thou persecutest — the supreme head 
and lord of the Church — the judge at whose name every knee 
in earth, in heaven, and in hell must bow ! The soul which 
now animates thee awaits the sentence of that great Judge, 
the avenger of guilt. Wilt thou despise Him also, and scorn 
the master as thou hast scorned his servants ?" 

Falling on his face (proceeds the chronicle) as he listened 
to this fearful apostrophe, the duke uttered appalling cries of 
agony, and, on regaining his self-command, not only tendered 
his homage to Innocent, but, divesting himself of all his do- 
minions, honors, and estates in favor of his daughter Eleonora, 
the destined wife of Louis VII., abandoned the world itself, 
and in his thirty- eighth year retired to some place of religious 
seclusion, where history loses all farther trace of him. 

I do not pause to winnow the truth from the monkish orna- 
ments which disfigure this narrative. It best illustrates as it 
stands, if not the actual occurrences of the times, yet at least 
the estimation in which Bernard was held by his contempora- 
ries. We know, from the incomparably more authentic in- 
formation of his letters, how they received and seconded his 
labors in the same cause both in the Grerman and the Italian 
courts. 

From them we learn that, under his influence and by his 
persuasion, peace was established between Pisa and G-enoa, 
and their respective allies in Lombardy ; a peace which not 
only brought to an end a long and cruel war, but which open- 
ed a passage into Italy to Lothaire, who, with Innocent in his 
camp, was advancing to the mountains. When he crossed 

Hh 



482 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

them, no enemy remained to the north of the Apennines to op- 
pose his progress, for Conrad of HohenstaufFen and his Milan- 
ese supporters were no longer able to derive either aid or shel- 
ter from the belligerents who had sheathed their swords at the 
voice of Bernard. Lothaire therefore advanced to Rome with 
Innocent, and there received from his hands the papal unction 
and the imperial crown. He did not, however, dispossess 
Anaclet either of the church of St. Peter or of the castle of St. 
Angelo, hut, returning to Grermany, left the rival popes to con- 
tend with each other by spiritual weapons. 

Of such arms Bernard was an absolute master ; and, at a 
council holden at Pisa, he successfully employed in the serv- 
ice, and as the representative of Innocent, all the eloquence 
for which he was renowned, and all the authority which he 
had acquired by the pacification of Lombardy. The synod, at 
his instance, solemnly excommunicated Anaclet and his sup- 
porters. 

Anselm, the archbishop of Milan, was one of the most con- 
siderable of that number ; and to Milan, therefore, Bernard 
proceeded to enforce the sentence against him. All the re- 
sources of hyperbole are exhausted by the chroniclers in then- 
attempt to describe and celebrate his reception in the city of 
Ambrose. As in the case of that illustrious father, the magis- 
trates and clergy, followed by a countless multitude of the 
citizens, thronged the approaches to his residence, resolved to 
place him by force, if necessary, on the archiepiscopal throne. 
Never was such advancement so ingeniously avoided. The en- 
thusiastic crowd was quieted and dispersed by his assurance 
that, on the morrow, he would mount his horse, and that, if 
the animal should remain within the city walls, he would ac- 
cept the proffered mitre, but if it should pass them, he should 
regard himself as free from any such obligation. The return- 
ing day found the saint in the saddle, and galloping with his 
utmost speed through the gates of Milan. A gleam of merri- 
ment, perhaps, for once lighted up those contemplative fea- 
tures ; and, ere long, his horse had added toythis good service 
by carrying him from the tumults of Italy to the tranquillity 
of Clairvaux. 

His repose, however, was but brief. Returning to Grer- 
many, h§ induced Lothaire to pass the Alps again at the head 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 483 

of a force destined for tlie conquest of Sicily and for the over- 
throw of Anaclet. As the emperor drew near to Rome, the in- 
defatigable Bernard appeared once more to guide and to encour- 
age him. But the expedition was not successful. The Sicil- 
ian duke, indeed, sustained a defeat near Salerno, hut not long 
after Lothaire himself died. In the succeeding year he was 
followed to the grave by Anaclet, by whose cardmals, how- 
ever, was chosen another pope, who assumed the name of Vic- 
tor. But with the pretensions, Yictor did not inherit the per- 
severance of his predecessor. He thought the contest either 
hopeless or sinful, or both; and, presenting himself to Ber- 
nard, he placed in his hands the abdication of his title to the 
Papacy. The schism thus reached its close, and, at the end 
of anxieties and labors which had been protracted through 
seven succeeding years, the abbot returned to his monastery 
with no worldly or ecclesiastical wealth or dignities, but yet 
in the consciousness of having rendered to mankind a service 
which both he and they regarded as inestimable, and which 
they repaid by such veneration and by so cordial an applause 
as had never greeted the most triumphant of military con- 
querors. 

The repose thus laboriously purchased was, however, to be 
short-lived. Innocent did not long survive his rival Anaclet, 
and before March, 1145, three popes had in succession filled 
the Papal throne. It was then transferred, by the unanimous 
voices of the College of Cardinals, to Bernard of Pisa, a disci- 
ple of Bernard of Clahvaux, once a brother of that monastery, 
where he had been so lightly esteemed, that his appointed of- 
fice had been to light and feed the fires at which the other 
monks were to warm themselves when chilled by their noc- 
turnal devotions. But, on his election, he assumed the name 
of Eugenius, and quickly proved that the mantle of Urban II. 
had descended upon him. 

Intelligence of the capture of Edessa by the Moslem had 
reached and alarmed Europe almost at the moment of the 
election of Eugenius. Bernard called upon the Pope to un- 
sheathe each of the two swords of Peter. Eugenius accord- 
ingly invoked the aid of the then eldest son of the Church, 
Louis le Jeune. To him the appeal was happily timed and 
welcome. The destruction of many of his own subjects in an 



484 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

attack on the city of Yitry hung heavily on Ms conscience^ 
and the crime, as he judged, could not be so effectually expi- 
ated as by the slaughter of a hundred-fold the same namber 
of Saracens at Edessa. Thus both the spiritual and the tem- 
poral sovereigns of Bernard joined in addressing to him a com- 
mission, or rather a command, to preach a new crusade to the 
faithful in France and Germany. 

Though his body was worn by fatigue, wasted by sickness, 
and emaciated by fasts and self-discipline, the soul of Bernard 
rose and expanded itself to the height of this sacred summons. 
In Easter of the year 1146, his attenuated figure, but still 
beaming eye, were conspicuous in the front of a lofty stage, 
erected on the slope of one of those hills which environ the 
town and plain of Yezelay. There sat the king and his queen 
Eleonora, and by them stood the great vassals, and prelates, 
and barons of his realm, with a throng of inferior knights and 
seigneurs, while in the front of this royal assemblage was 
gathered a mighty host, crowding the hill sides and the plain 
below, and all awaiting in breathless silence the voice of the 
renowned orator who stood before them. 

There is, I believe, no extant record of his speech, though 
never before or since was eloquence rewarded by so signal a 
triumph. He appears to have given a rhetorical impersona- 
tion to the Holy City, and in her name to have been calling 
on his hearers to rescue her from the grasp of the followers of 
the False Prophet, when he was interrupted by a shout aris- 
ing simultaneously from all the countless ranks of that agita- 
ted multitude, thousands and tens of thousands of voices rais- 
ing, repeating, and again and again re-echoing the exclama- 
tion, "It is the will of G-od !" A single soul seemed to have 
possessed the whole of that innumerable company. Casting 
himself at the feet of the speaker, the king first received from 
his hands the cross, which irrevocably bound him who bore it 
to engage in person in that perilous adventure. Beside her 
lord, and devoted to the same high enterprise, knelt Eleonora. 
The princes, bishops, barons, knights, and seigneurs followed 
her example, and then the commons, wave after wave press- 
ing forward, in interminable succession, to the immediate 
presence of Bernard, continued till nightfall, and through the 
whole of the succeeding day, to besiege him with importunate 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 485 

demands for crosses, until, after exhausting every other re- 
source, he had torn his own Benedictine habit into shreds, to 
serve as badges for this noble army of martyrs. 

The great master of the spell, himself inflamed by the enthu- 
siasm which he thus excited, hurrying from province to prov- 
ince and from city to city, every where demanded new cham- 
pions of the Holy Sepulchre. At Chartres, another mighty 
congregation listened and obeyed, but not without a response, 
which, little as it was either foreseen or welcomed by Bernard, 
seems not to have been altogether unreasonable. They de- 
manded that, exchanging his cowl and tunic for a coat of mail, 
he should, in his own person, conduct them to the warfare 
against the infidel. He still retained, however, too much so- 
briety for this. Perhaps he had already awakened to the truth 
that, among his half-maddened associates, there were not a 
few with whom it would ill suit him to contract so intimate 
a personal alliance. 

Of that number was Rodolph, a G-erman monk, who had 
taken on himself the task of arousing the zeal of his fellow- 
countrymen. But Rodolph was one of those men who, when 
they have once yoked themselves to any principle, are dragged 
helplessly along by it into the most extravagant of its seeming 
consequences. It was meritorious to slay the enemies of the 
Cross in Palestine ; could, it then be right or allowable to 
spare them in Germany ? Finding the question unanswer- 
able, Rodolph, from the sources to the mouth of the Rhine, 
brought his hearers to prepare themselves for the destruction 
of the Saracens by the massacre of the Jews. 

I doubt whether the title of any of the saints whom the 
Church of Rome has raised to her honors of canonization would 
be justified by any proofs of his having cultivated the virtue 
of toleration, excepting only in the single case of Bernard of 
Clairvaux. It was with a noble inconsistency that he dissented 
from the inexorable logic of Rodolph ; for, while himself 
sounding the trumpet which marshaled the Christian nations 
of Europe to the slaughter of the unbelieving inhabitants of 
Asia, he addressed to the German people an encyclical epistle, 
commending the hereditary enemies of the Gospel to their 
kindness and forbearance, in terms as eloquent as could have 
been dictated by Jeremy Taylor, and as wise as could have 



486 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE, 

been suggested by John Locke, if those apostles of toleration 
had then been living. 

Nor was it by his letters only that Bernard taught the Grer- 
mans to be at once thus merciful and merciless. During many 
weeks or months he traversed their land in person, attended 
by some of the monks of his order, who have left us a daily 
journal of that miraculous peregrination ; for every step was 
a miracle. So numerous and so stupendous were the prodi- 
gies which he wrought in stimulating his proselytes to march 
to the holy war, that death and disease may be said to have 
retired, like vanquished foes, at his presence. The authors of 
these narratives, however, select, as the miracle of miracles, 
the conversion of the Emperor Conrad III., and his assump- 
tion of the Cross. It may seem presumptuous to dispute their 
judgment on such a question ; but to myself the most pro- 
digious of all the prodigies they record, and certainly the best 
attested, appears to be the fact that, though he was totally 
ignorant of G-erman, and always preached in French, yet such 
was the magic of Bernard's discourses, even when utterly in- 
comprehensible, that, from Constance to Cologne, the Teutonic 
gravity was every where rapt at his bidding into an immutable 
resolution to march from the banks of the Rhine to those of the 
Jordan. I have no doubt of the general good faith with which 
all these marvels are told ; and these Itinera G-ermanica seem 
to me not destitute of a real and appropriate value. They 
curiously illustrate the strange extent to which vast masses 
of men, under the sympathetic influence of any profound emo- 
tion, may become utterly incapable of the natural use, not 
only of their reasonable understandings, but even of their bod- 
ily senses. 

Leaving his Grerman proselytes to prepare for their long pil- 
grimage to the East, Bernard returned to France to expedite 
the departure of that mighty armament, and then retired to 
the devout and placid solitude of Clairvaux. There, in due 
time, he learned that the war which he had so exultingly pro- 
voked had swept away at least two hundred thousand of his 
fellow-countrymen and fellow-Christians, the helpless victims 
of woes as fearful as they were profitless and inglorious. There 
is still living in the person of the Abbe de Ratisbonne, his latest 
biographer, at least one devout and zealous apologist of the 



POWER OF THE PEN IN PRANCE. 487 

author of this lamentable carnage ; and from the abbe we may- 
learn, that, in the retrospect of this great catastrophe, Bernard 
found nothing to disturb the tranquillity of his cell and of his 
conscience. Adopting what seems to me at once the more 
probable and the more charitable opinion, I rather conclude 
that the review of the calamities which his ill-directed zeal 
had brought on his country and on mankind was the immedi- 
ate cause which brought his life to an unexpected, though not 
an early close, not long after the return of Louis with the four 
fragments of the noblest army which had ever followed the Ori- 
flamme of St. Denys, under the guidance of a king of France. 

The preceding account of the mighty influence exercised by 
Bernard over some of the great movements of his age will not 
have been misplaced if (as I trust) it shall contribute to render 
intelligible to you the still more powerful control which he ex- 
ercised over its opinions. To estimate aright the extent of that 
authority, it would indeed be requisite to refer to the collection 
of his letters, almost all of which relate to the questions, polit- 
ical or religious, by which his generation was chiefly agitated. 
They show that he was employed day by day, continually, in 
adjusting the disputes of princes, in considering the complaints 
of their subjects, in redressing the grievances of the oppressed, 
in arbitrating between litigants, in founding monasteries and 
bishoprics, in providing for the wants of all the churches, and, 
above all, in the decision of controverted points of doctrine. 
"Aiunt non vos esse Papam" (he says to Pope Eugenius), 
" sed me, et undique ad me confluunt qui habent negotia." 
And in this character of a substituted or auxiliary pontiff", 
elected by general acclamation, we find him ruling the delib- 
erations and guiding the decisions of almost every ecclesias- 
tical synod of his times, but of none wdth results more remark- 
able than those which followed the acts of the council holden 
in the year 1121, in the city and church of Sens. 

Rallying his strength and spirits after the great calamity of 
liis life, Abelard had resumed his chair in the University of 
Paris, or rather amid the students whom his reputation still 
drew round him, on the mount and in the gardens sacred to 
Ste. Grenevieve, the patroness of that city. His speculations 
on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity had been communicated, 
not merely to his pupils, but to the world at large, in a book 



488 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

which awakened the alarms and stimulated the zeal of the 
orthodox Ahbot of Clairvaux. If Bernard be accurate, it re- 
produced and combined the heresies of Arius, of Pelagius, and 
of Nestorius. But he was too good and wise a man to make 
any public assault upon the writer of it, until he had first en- 
deavored, by a private and friendly remonstrance, to convince 
him of his errors, and to induce him to retract them. The 
vulgar arts of vulgar controversialists were beneath the genius, 
and alien from the spu-it of St. Bernard ; and winning by his 
kindness an opponent whom he might probably have exasper- 
ated by less gentle methods, he induced Abelard at least to 
promise a retraction. The promise, however, was not fulfilled. 
On th'e contrary, Abelard, reverting to his former habits of 
thought, published other books of the same general tendency, 
and among them the treatise called " Sic et Non," to which I 
have already adverted. 

Bernard then broke silence, and, in a letter to Pope Inno- 
cent II., he denounced, not merely the doctrines of Abelard, 
but the whole scheme and system of investigation which had 
conducted him to them, invoking the authority of the Pope to 
suppress so great a scandal. Abelard answered by equally 
loud protestations of his innocence and orthodoxy, and appealed 
to a council then about to be holden in the city of Sens. 

Never had tidings of an approaching tournament excited 
more universal interest in France than was kindled by the in- 
telligence of the passage at arms, which was accordingly ap- 
pointed to take place between the two great doctors and rhet- 
oricians of that age. Bernard, however, was at first reluctant 
to engage in the contemplated debate. He answered the sum- 
mons of the Archbishop of Sens in the words of David : "I am 
but a youth, and he a man of war from his youth." But he 
was not permitted so to withdraw from the conflict with the 
Goliath of Rationalism. It was, he says, with tears in his eyes, 
that he at length consented to meet this terrible adversary ; 
but it was with faith and hope in his heart. He strengthened 
himself by revolving the words of Christ, "Take no thought 
how or what ye shall speak, for it shall be given you in that 
same hour what ye shall speak." And again borrowing the 
language of David, he comforted himself by the words, " The 
Lord is my strength ; I will not fear what man can do unto 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE, 489 

me." The event showed that any other preparations for this 
dreaded encounter would have been superfluous. 

In the great church of Sens appeared all the Fathers of the 
council, and there also appeared Louis YII. himself, with the 
chief dignitaries of his realm, ecclesiastical and secular, all 
animated with the same curiosity to listen to the anticipated 
debate between the two master spirits of the age. 

It was opened by Bernard. He produced the writings of 
Abelard, enumerated his imputed errors, and demanded that 
he should either vindicate or retract them. Expectation was 
raised to the highest pitch, when, to the surprise and disap- 
pointment of the whole assembly, the eloquent Abelard re- 
mained inflexibly silent. He was either unable or unwilling 
to utter a single word in his own defense, and at length pre- 
cipitately quitted the synod, after interposing an appeal to the 
Pope against their decision. They rejected his appeal, and 
unanimously condemned his doctrines as heretical. Once again 
the now victorious Bernard borrowed from David the language 
in which to express the feelings with which he contemplated 
the triumphant result of this much-dreaded controversy. " I 
myself," he exclaimed, " have seen the ungodly in great pow- 
er, and flourishing like the green bay-tree. I went -by, and, 
lo ! he was gone ; I sought him, and his place was nowhere to 
be found." The proceedings of the Council of Sens were then 
transmitted to Rome, and the Pope, confirming their decision, 
sentenced Abelard to an eternal silence. 

The defeated philosopher did not prolong the struggle. His 
spirit seems to have been broken by affliction, and his body 
worn by labor and excitement. He sought for tranquillity by 
publishing what has been usually called his retractation, though 
it would perhaps, with greater reason, be called his apology 
for his writings. But neither Bernard, nor any of the theolo- 
gians of the times, pressed hardly on their fallen foe. He was 
a Sampson Agonistes, terrible even in defeat, and his conquer- 
ors wisely acquiesced in his retractation, such as it was, and 
sought by kindness to restore him to the bosom of the Church. 
Within two years from the close of this dispute, he was sum- 
moned from the world in which he had accumulated so much 
knowledge, but had attained to so little happiness. Before his 
death, the friendship which had once subsisted between Ber- 



490 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

nard and himself was re-estaUislied. Nor can we doubt tliat, 
in tlie contemplation of that great event, both the Realist and 
the Nominalist derived comfort from the belief that, in pass- 
ing from the world of shadows into the regions of light, they 
should both find a far more perfect solution of those deep mys- 
teries than they had been able to attain either in the cloisters 
of Clairvaux or in the schools of Paris. 

" To speak it plainly," says M. G-uizot, " Protestantism is 
'^ nothing else than the insurrection of the human mind against 
the spiritual despotism of the sacerdotal order." To the recla- 
mations of such insurgents in the twelfth century, the Church 
of Rome opposed not merely the sacred text as interpreted by 
primseval and unbroken traditions, but also another authority, 
less liable than these to be perverted or misunderstood, yet (as 
she maintained) of an origin not less divine. The Deity him- 
self (said the Realist and orthodox doctors of that age) has en- 
graven on the souls of all the children of Adam many legible 
and most significant characters. These inscriptions, though 
coeval in each man with his birth, may be obscured by car- 
nality or worldliness, as, on the other hand, they may be ren- 
dered more luminous and intelligible by self-discipline, and by 
habits of devotion and of virtue. But, whether darkened or 
illuminated, they must still remain indelible in every human 
bosom, at once bearing witness to the truths which it is the 
office of the Church to perpetuate, and rendering the accept- 
ance of them not so much a duty as a law and a necessity of 
our moral nature — a necessity which ceases, indeed, then, but 
only then, when the soul to which such truths are proclaimed, 
being blinded by its own pollutions, is effectually deprived of 
its spiritual discernment. 

Such I believe to be an accurate summary of the doctrine 
of St. Bernard on this subject. But I would rather present 
it to you in his own words: "There is," he says, "nothing 
in the Divine intellect which is not eternal and immutable. 
Thus those principia rerum, which Plato calls ideas, are not 
mere mental images. Possessing the attributes of eternity and 
immutability, they must be realities ; nor does any thing ex- 
ist, whatever may be the mode of its existence, excej)t by a 
union to them." 

" A spirit, whose origin and abode is celestial, has ever be- 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 491 

fore her eyes tlie mirror in whicli she contemplates all things. 
She beholds the Divine Logos ; and in the Logos the whole of 
the creation which the Logos has called into existence. So 
that she does not draw her knowledge of the Creator from the 
creation ; nor, when she would attain to the knowledge of cre- 
ated things, is it necessary for her to descend among them ; 
for she beholds them all in a position where they exist in a 
manner more excellent than any in which they do or can exist 
in themselves." 

" The mysteries of our faith do not depend on human rea- 
son, but rest on the immutable foundations of truth. "What ! 
ask mo to doubt of that which of all things is the most abso- 
lutely true ? Faith is not an opinion formed in us by our la- 
borious studies. It is an interior conviction, to which con- 
science bears its testimony. It is the basis of our reasonings, 
not their conclusion. It is no inference from our investiga- 
tions, but is itself an absolute certainty." 

If to this teaching of St. Bernard any one had answered that 
the innate ideas, which reflect in the human soul, as in a mir- 
ror, the eternal and immutable realities of the Divine intellect 
(and especially such of those ideas as relate to our faith as 
Christians), are, after all, but so many individual revelations, 
which can be seen only by each man for himself, and which 
none can exhibit to his neighbor, his answer, as I infer from 
his habitual tone of thought, would have been, that the sub- 
stantial coincidence or identity of such ideas in all regenerate 
men is not without a clear and a conclusive attestation. He 
would have found such an attestation in that unity of senti- 
ment and of belief by which (as he insisted) the several mem- 
bers of the Catholic Church are held together as one living 
body, animated by one all-informing soul — a union, the sacred 
harmony of which results from the concord of the innumerable 
strings vibrating in the spirits of each and of all of those whom 
it embraces. 

I am very conscious that my feet are but too liable to stum- 
ble on such mountain tops as I am treading, and that their at- 
mosphere is too fine for my respiration. Nevertheless, I must 
request you to accompany me a few steps farther on these gid- 
dy heights, 

I have already said that Bernard was prepared by maternal 



492 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

tenderness for that philosophy — ^the philosophy of Love — which 
he adopted in his more mature years. To make that general 
statement intelligible, I must touch, though most briefly, on 
topics the sanctity of which I might but too probably violate 
if I presumed to dwell on them at any greater length. I would 
observe, then, that he found a Summa Theologiee in the sub- 
lime declaration that " the pure in heart shall see God." He 
judged that, when so admitted to the sight of Him who is at 
once Light and Love, the pure in heart would derive from that 
beatific vision such an insight into all truth, and so ardent a 
thirst for perfect conformity to the Divine image, that casting 
aside, while still denizens of earth, the crutches of human in- 
vestigation and the thraldom of human passions, they would 
soar, as on the wings • of eagles, into those celestial regions 
where knowledge is intuitive, and love and wisdom are the 
very elements of life. Kindling with some such conceptions 
as these, St. Bernard selected the Book of Canticles as the 
theme of his most celebrated, though (I suppose) his least in- 
telligible work. 

To us who know man only in his social state, and have no 
personal experience of him in his cloistered condition, the vis- 
ions which peopled the brain of the great St. Bernard may per- 
haps appear but as so many phantasms, or as air -bubbles, re- 
flecting gorgeous colors for the amusement of the child who 
has inflated them. I will not undertake to assert their sub- 
stantial value, but I am well convinced that even the day- 
dreams of such a man are entitled to our reverence and ten- 
derness, and that some knowledge of them is essential to a 
correct understanding of the growth and progress of philosoph- 
ical literature in France. 

An anchorite is almost of necessity a Mystic, that is, one 
who habitually infers the objective from the subjective ; or, 
in plainer words, one who assumes the existence of realities 
without him, corresponding with the most cherished of the 
visionary thoughts within him. The mind, cut off" from the 
common duties, interests, and affections of life, wedded to an 
emaciated, and enervated, and therefore irritable body, and 
continually driven inward for occupation, creates for itself sub- 
stitutes for the objects among which others live, and readily 
glides into the belief that its own figments are so many innate 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 493 

ideas — ^types of actual entities — creatures of a divine original, 
and of an eternal and immutable existence. To the prisoner 
of the convent these deliriums may be as innocuous as they 
are pleasant ; to the denizens of the wide world they are nei- 
ther the one nor the other. 

St. Bernard was pre-eminently a Mystic ; nor does the term 
convey any reproach. It is, indeed, ascribed to him, and to 
the other ascetic heroes and heroines of his age, in the most 
recent panegyrics of the most eloquent and learned of existing 
Roman Catholic biographers. In what sense that eulogium 
is bestowed and is to be understood, may be best explained by 
referring to the writings in which the most renowned of all 
his monastic contemporaries has developed the mysteries of 
those transcendental doctrines, so far, at least, as they can be 
intelligibly revealed in the language in use among uninspired 
men. 

In the age of Bernard there was living at the monastery of 
■ Boppart, near Bingen, a lady who has since been immortalized 
under the name of Sainte Hildegarde. His interpretation of 
the promise that "the pure in heart shall see Grod" is sup- 
posed by the hagiologists to have received in her its most com- 
plete accomplishment. During his mission to raise champions 
of the Cross in Germany, he visited her at her convent, and 
they ever afterward lived in the habitual interchange of letters 
with each other. The subjects, and the nature of that cor- 
respondence, may be learned from his published epistles, or 
from the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, or from any of the 
many histories of her life which her admirers have given to 
the world ; or, better still, from the books in which she com- 
municated to others the awful disclosures from on high which 
she believed to have been made to herself. 

From these sources it is to be collected that, in the third 
year of her life, Hildegarde first became conscious of a brill- 
iant light, which, being at once material and spiritual, radiated 
through her body until it had reached and illuminated her soul. 
These beams, which, of course, were of heavenly origin, reap- 
peared to her at frequent intervals during the next fourscore 
years. And surpassingly wonderful was their influence. They 
imparted to her, as she devoutly believed, a perfect compre- 
hension of all the Holy Scriptures, rendering transparent to 



494 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

her the mysteries which they darkly intimate to others. Dis- 
cerning in the mirror of her own mind many of the eternal 
and immutable ideas of the Divine intellect, she was enabled 
to perceive what are the corresponding forms and what the 
analogous laws by which this mundane system is pervaded 
and governed. The primitive matter of which all things ma- 
terial are composed was laid bare to her in its elementary 
state. The soul of man, becoming the object of her spiritual- 
ized sense, was discovered to be " a celestial harmony." The 
awful attributes and ineffable nature of the Blessed Virgin be- 
came to Hildegarde the subject of immediate consciousness. 
Ascending to the eternal and perennial fountains of life, she 
surveyed the operations of the creative energy. Descending 
to this low«r world, she beheld unrolled before her the future 
history and the ultimate destination of our race, and especially 
the reign of anti- Christ and the ultimate triumph of the Church, 
which is at once Catholic and Roman. 

If Ste. Hildegarde were now living among us, who would be 
so cruel as to disturb, who so idle as to listen to her hallucina- 
tions ? But mental nosology was a science neither understood 
nor studied in the twelfth century. At that time, Bernard, the 
greatest of the canonized doctors whom the Church of Home 
can claim as peculiarly her own (for the Fathers of the first 
five centuries belong to the Church Universal), hailed and re- 
vered the revelations of the prophetess as if she had been an- 
other Miriam. " They are not," he said, " the work of man, 
nor will any man be able to understand them whose soul love 
has not restored to the Divine image and likeness." " They 
who ascribe these visions to demoniacal suggestions prove that 
they have no deep acquaintance with heavenly contemplations." 

Nor was this the judgment of Bernard alone. During no 
less than three successive months, the books of Hildegarde en- 
gaged the attention of a synod convened^by Eugenius at Treves. 
The Fathers assembled there concurred in the opinions of the 
Abbot of Clairvaux ; and Eugenius, in an autograph letter, 
exhorted her " diligently to cherish in her heart the grace 
which G-od had lavished upon her, but never to divulge, with- 
out extreme circumspection, what that Divine grace might 
prompt her to say." Nor was this all. No less than three 
other infallible Popes, Anastasius IV., Adrian IV.. and Alex- 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 495 

ancler III., who succeeded Eugenius on the Papal tlu-one, each 
in his turn gave his sanction to the reveries of Ste. Hildegarde. 

If these legends should appear to you too puerile for any se- 
rious notice, or too remote from our present subject to be no- 
ticed on tliis occasion, I answer that the mysticism which they 
illustrate was really pregnant with the most important results, 
both speculative and practical. In speculation, it was at once 
the fruit and the root of Bernard's doctrine of Realism. In 
practice, it was the too prolific germ of those relentless perse- 
cutions which have left their sanguinary stain upon almost 
every page of the annals of the Church of Rome. 

Assume that the state, as the minister of the Church, has 
power enough to terrify into silence and submission all dis- 
senters from the established creed, and then three steps only 
are wanting to perfect the theory of persecution. The first, 
that the dominant Church is infallibly right ; the second, that 
the imputed error is fatal to the souls of those who hold it ; the 
third, that the heretic dissents, not from weakness or error of 
judgment, but from depravity of will. Now Realism, and 
Mysticism its offspring, supply each of those steps. 

For if, as Bernard taught, faith is the basis, not the conclu- 
sion of our reasonings ; and if that basis be itself laid in leg- 
ible characters, engraven indelibly by the Creator on the souls 
of his rational creature man, then every one who can read those 
characters is infallible, so far, at least, as they accompany and 
conduct him. And if, on comparing those characters with the 
imputed heresy, he finds that the collision between the two is 
direct, and that it takes place in the highest regions of these 
divinely-inspued ideas, then the fatal tendency of it is demon- 
strated. And, inasmuch as the dissenter can be prevented 
from discerning in his own mind the same sacred indications 
*>of truth only by that blindness which is the result and the pun- 
ishment of his carnal or worldly pollutions, his dissent is not 
. error, but guilt. The remedy for it is not argument, but the 
stake. Thus the acceptance by popes and doctors of the in- 
coherent rhapsodies of an illiterate old woman as evidences of 
so many innate ideas reflecting the eternal verities of the Di- 
vine intellect, closed the door to all reasoning with those who 
rejected their creed, or any part of it. The believers and the 
dissenters had no common premises on which to argue. To 



496 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

the imputed heretics, the reflections on the mental mirror of 
Ste. Hildegarde were hut as so many delirious scrawls on the 
prison walls of a lunatic. To her patrons they were as author- 
itative as the handwriting on the palace wall of Belshazzar. 

Bernard himself, it is true, though a Realist, and therefore 
a Mystic, was not a persecutor. His too successful efforts for 
the destruction of the followers of the False Prophet, whatever 
may he the censure due to him on account of them, had no- 
thing in common with the guilt of his brethren of Citeaux, of 
St. Dominic, and of Innocent III., in their crusade against the 
Albigenses. Had he lived till then, I fear that his principles 
must have conducted him to a full participation in those 
crimes. But he was a wise and a holy man, whose hourly 
prayer not to be " led into temptation" was not offered in vain. 

I can not claim such an acquaintance with him, as he is 
exhibited in his own books, as to be able to offer any general 
criticism upon them. But I know enough of them to under- 
stand why, in France, the land of eloquence, so high, if not 
indeed the very highest, place has been assigned to the elo- 
quence of Bernard. The opinion, or, perhaps, I should rather 
say the conjecture, which I venture to hazard on his writings 
is, that they are such as could proceed only from a man whose 
whole existence had become one prolonged alternation of study 
and of devotion, who never ceased to worship except to write, 
and never laid down his pen except to pray. Whenever he de- 
scends from the mountain to speak with men, the Shekinah is 
visible on his countenance. It is, I believe, for this reason 
chiefly, though not exclusively, that every section of the Uni- 
versal Church has ever rendered him the homage which usual- 
ly each reserves for its own heroical men, and for them alone. 
The testimonies of Protestants in his favor might be drawn 
from all the countless divisions and subdivisions of the Protest- 
ant world. It is enough to refer to the two greatest of the 
leaders of the " insurrection against the spiritual despotism of 
the sacerdotal order." Luther says of Bernard that " omnes 
dootores vincit;" and Calvm, that " ita loquitur ut Veritas ipsa 
loqui videatur." 

No similar veneration has ever waited on the name and mem- 
ory of Abelard. The sentence which has been passed upon him 
by posterity may have been severe, but it is now irreversible. 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 497 

For some passages of his life no defense is possible, nor shall I 
make myself the apologist for much of what he has written. 
But to the charge that he was the founder of the Rationalistic 
system in modern Europe, it may, I think, he well answered, 
that the reproach is too indefinite to convey any precise mean- 
ing, or to admit of any distinct refutation. 

A Rationalist is usually censured as one who gratifies the 
pride of our common nature by subjecting all doctrines, those 
of revelation not excepted, to the scrutiny and judgment of 
his understanding ; and by making his own reason the stand- 
ard of truth, or, at least, of his own appreciation of truth. 
That such pride mingles with most of our thoughts, and there- 
fore with the thoughts of those who are usually condemned as 
Rationalists, no one will probably deny. But the same re- 
buke may, I think, be addressed with equal, or perhaps with 
greater, force to most of their antagonists. The exultation of 
Bernard and his adherents, for example, in contemplating 
themselves as. so many living depositaries of the reflected 
ideas of the Creator, was probably more haughty, as it was 
certainly more unfounded, than the exultation of Abelard and 
his disciples in contemplating themselves as the depositaries 
of a power, by the right use of which divine truth might be 
interpreted or discovered. There is a pride of belief as well as 
a pride of investigation, and I know not which of the two pas- 
sions is the more unruly. 

Neither can I perceive that Abelard erred in thinking that, 
by the constitution of our nature, each man's reason is, and 
must be, to himself the ultimate judge of truth. That such 
is the province of our reason is, indeed, most impressively, 
though unconsciously, admitted in every attempt to disprove 
it. If you encounter such Rationalism as this by argument, 
you are appealing to the very reason which it is the object of 
your argument to silence and dethrone. The stake is the only 
consistent and practical refutation of the imputed error. 

But, on the other hand, that Rationalism which conducted 
Abelard, as it has conducted so many others, to the conclusion 
that human reason is not merely the judge of truth, but is 
also the one guide to truth, seems to me not only a danger- 
ous, but a fatal mistake. 

His text, as we have seen, was " Dubitando ad inquisitio- 

Ii 



498 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

nem venimus, inquirendo veritatem percipimus," I dissent 
from each, of those positions. 

First. " Dutitando ad inquisitionem venimus" is an apoph- 
thegm, in deference to which many of the greatest intellects 
in France, as I shall hereafter have occasion to show, have 
brought their minds into what is called " a state of provisional 
doubt ;" and great is the glory which they have won by this 
achievement. To myself no boast appears more unjust or un- 
meaning. 

Faith, not doubt, is the indispensable condition aifd the law 
of our existence. Life begins with credulity ; and, to the close 
of life, an implicit trust in the opinions of others is the lot, not 
m.erely of the unlearned many, but, to a very great extent, of 
the most learned among the instructed few. The wisest of 
the children of men have ever held, and must ever hold, the 
vast majority of their most important convictions, not on in- 
quiry, but on trust. 

The true doctrine I take to be rather, " Credendo ad inqui- 
sitionem venimus." You must take a multitude of things for 
granted if you would know any thing to the purpose. The 
child assumes the knowledge and veracity of his parents. The 
pupil reposes the same credit in his preceptor. The philoso- 
pher relies on the reports of the experimentalist, and the states- 
m.an on the calculations of the statician. Nay, the Divine 
teacher of all truth among men — He who was Himself the 
impersonation of wisdom^ — taught that obedience is th.e path 
to knowledge ; and that we must do the will of our Maker, in 
order to know of the doctrine ; or, in other words, that we 
must not provisionally question, but provisionally assume, the 
authority of our best accessible instructor, in order that we 
may subsequently verify or correct that assumption by the ex- 
perience to wliich it will conduct us. 

Neither can I subscribe to the ' ' Inquirendo veritatem per- 
cipimus" without large qualifications. Inquiry conducts us, 
not so much to truth itself as to the best teachers of truth. 
Life is not long enough, the human mind is not capacious 
enough, to enable any man to build up a complete system of 
knowledge and belief by his own investigations. The Author 
of our being has not left his creature man, with his feeble 
powers and his short span of life, to grope out, by his own 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 499 

isolated studies, those truths which it most concerns him to 
reach and to hold firmly. It is not by our own researches that 
we attain to truth in what concerns our health of body, or our 
individual or our social interests. In those matters our in- 
quiries do but conduct us to the best attainable guides, and 
place us under their direction. The case is not essentially 
otherwise when we are investigating the great problems of 
our actual condition in this life, and of our prospects be- 
yond it. 

I have thus ventured, and certainly in no forge tfulness of 
the seeming presumption of the attempt, to indicate what I 
suppose to be the errors of the Realist and Mystic Bernard on 
the one hand, and of the Nominalist and Rationalistic Abelard 
on the other. I have done so because, in the metaphysical 
style of the modern French language, they were the earliest 
" expressions," in their native country, of the two great an- 
tagonistic principles by which, from their days to our own, it 
has been distracted. These are the principle of faith and the 
principle of reason. Names and forms have, indeed, passed 
away. Realism and Nominalism are no longer the inscriptions 
on the banners of the contending hosts. But that abstruse 
metaphysical debate, however hidden under new modes of 
speech, still lies at the root of this immortal controversy. The 
innate ideas of Des Cartes, the mysterious doctrines of Kant 
(so far as I have any information respecting them), and Mr. 
Coleridge's much-cherished distinction of the pure reason and 
the practical understanding, were but so many republications 
of the Realism of St. Bernard. At the close of the incompara- 
ble essay with which M. Cousin has introduced his publication 
of the Ouvrages Inedits d' Abelard (to which I gladly acknowl- 
edge myself to be indebted for all that I know on the subject 
of his doctrines) occurs a passage which explains, with so much 
beauty and exactness, the permanent importance of the debate 
on which I have been dwelling, that I can not better terminate 
this lecture than by attempting to lay it before you in our own 
language, so far, at least, as it is in my power to find any 
equivalents in English for his refined and almost Platonic 
phraseology. 

"A problem (says M. Cousin), which might seem scarcely 
worthy to be made the subject even of a philosophical revery, 



500 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

gave birth to different metaphysical systems. Those systems 
agitated the schools, and, at first, the schools only. Ere long 
they passed from the province of metaphysics into that of re- 
ligion, and from religion they advanced into the region of poli- 
tics. Then, taking their place on the historical stage, they 
interposed in the events of the world, agitated councils, and 
afforded occupation to kings, William the Conqueror is sum- 
moned into the field by the English clergy against the Nomi- 
nalist Roscelin, and Louis YII. becomes the president of the 
synod in which Bernard, the hero of the age, denounces the 
Conceptionist Abelard, himself the teacher of Arnaud of Bres- 
cia. All this is, however, but a prelude. Time runs its course. 
Conceptionism, which, during nearly two centuries, has cher- 
ished Nominalism in its bosom, at length sets its charge at 
liberty ; and then this new consequence, or, rather, this re- 
newed consequence of the same fundamental principle, find- 
ing the times more favorable, appears with a far different lus- 
tre, and excites tempests never experienced till then. Occam 
(a new Roscelin), by once more applying Nominalism to the- 
ology, and so to politics, checks the power of the Pope, engages 
a king and an emperor in his quarrel, and, sheltering himself 
against the lightnings of Rome under the wings of the imperial 
eagle, is able to say to the head of the empire, with no unbe- 
coming pride, ' Tu me defende gladio ; ego te defendam calamo.' 
Abandoned by the King of France, but aided by the Emperor 
of Grermany, the indomitable Franciscan, escaping from the 
dungeon of Roger Bacon, dies in exile at Munich. But he 
has been a teacher at Paris — that prolific soil in which no 
seeds which have once been committed to it are ever permitted 
to perish. The University of Paris embraces the proscribed 
doctrine. Nominalism, triumphant, diffuses the spirit of in- 
dependence. That new spirit gives birth to the Councils of 
Constance and of Basle, where appear the great Nominalists, 
Peter d'Ailly and John Gerson — those fathers of the G-allican 
Church — those sage Reformers, whose voices are unheeded, 
and who are, ere long, replaced by that other Nominalist call- 
ed Luther. It were well, therefore, not to be so very face- 
tious on the subject of metaphysics, for metaphysics embrace 
at once the original principles and the ultimate principles of 
all things." 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 501 



LECTURE XVIIL 

ON THE POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

Eminent as was the place of Herbert, of Bernard, and of 
Atelard in the literature of France, yet, in their days, French 
literature was still unborn. Neither the theologians, nor the 
chroniclers, who plied their pens in the Benedictine monaster- 
ies, nor the Troubadours, who practiced their gay science in 
the Provencal courts of love, made use of that language which 
in our own days is vernacular in their native country. Latin 
in its various forms, classical, scholastic, colloquial, and rustic, 
was their only instrument of communication with their own or 
future ages ; and, for this reason, neither the holy unction of 
the Abbot of Clairvaux, nor the philosophical acumen of his 
great rival, nor the songs or romances which once charmed 
the court of Toulouse, ever retained any permanent hold on 
the hearts or on the memories of the men of later times. 

The earliest writers to whom that glory belongs are those 
who, having been present either as actors or as spectators at 
the great military achievements of their age and nation, re- 
corded them in narratives in which the styles appropriate to 
chronicle, to history, and to memoirs are confounded, or, rather, 
are harmonized with each other. Of that class of writers, 
three only retain, and probably they alone deserve, at this day, 
the admiration which greeted them in their own — I refer to . 
Joinville, to Froissart, and to Philippe de Comines. '/ 

It is not the least of the glories of the reign of St. Louis that 
it produced the first fruits of that abundant harvest of glory 
which was to be gathered in by writers, in his own native 
tongue, in each generation succeeding to his own. Our ac- 
knowledgment of the wealth and abundance of that harvest 
should be made with no niggard hand or grudging spirit ; for 
if the extent to which the intellectual labors of any people are 
diffused and welcomed beyond the limits of their own territory 
and language is the best criterion of their excellence (and I 



502 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

know of none less doubtful), we must concede to the great 
authors of France a pre-eminence above those of any other 
country in modern Europe. Be that, however, as it may, I at 
present refer to the influence which they have exercised in the 
remotest parts of the civilized world, as affording us some indi- 
cation of the authority which they have possessed at home — 
some measure of that domestic power of the pen, on the right 
use or abuse of which so much of their good or evil fortunes, 
as a nation, has been dependent. To understand the workings 
of that power is to understand not merely the gi-eat writers of 
France, but the people, also, for whom they wrote. 

In that country, as in every other, the authority of men of 
letters has always consisted in the exactness with which they 
have succeeded in reflecting in their books the better and more 
enduring aspects of the character of their nation. They nmst 
be the interpreters of the habitual state of mind of those for 
whom they write, or they must write in vain. They must give 
utterance to thoughts which their less gifted readers would 
have uttered if they could. They must bring into the light 
ideas which, when clothed by them in appropriate terms, oth- 
ers will recognize, or will suppose themselves to recognize, as 
so many conceptions which, in inchoate and immature forms, 
were already struggling for birth in their own minds. It is 
by means of such services, and of such illusions as these, that, 
in each generation, the foremost understandings make willing 
captives of the multitude, and, if they be true to their high 
calling, mold them into docile and obedient pupils. The ac- 
tion and reaction of the literature and of the national character 
of any people upon each other is the true subject of their moral 
and intellectual history. 

It is especially so with regard to France. Nowhere else have 
books and men borne so intimate a relation to each other. 
Whoever has much studied their books must be of a sluggish 
imagination if he has not seen the land and its inhabitants with 
his mental eye even before he has actually visited them. Not 
only their dramatists, their novelists, and their memou- writ- 
ers, but their divines, philosophers, moralists, and historians, 
are ever drawing from the life. The Misanthrope, or the Me- 
moirs of St. Simon, are not more absolutely French than the 
Essays of Montaigne or the Discourses of Massillon. Sternes 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 503 

la Fleur is not so thoroughly a Frenchman as Montesquieu. 
From the literary works, grave and gay, of the French people, 
which lie in such profusion before us, we may perhaps, there- 
fore, be able to infer something of the spirit of the land for 
which they were composed, and of the influence of that spirit 
on the authors of them. 

First, then, every one who is at all conversant with the great 
writers of France will, I believe, be prompt to acknowledge 
their superiority to all other European writers, and especially 
to our own, in the art or the power of perspicuity. Compare, 
for example, the language of Montaigne, of Pascal, of Bossuet, 
or of Montesquieu, with the style of Hooker, or Milton, or Jer- 
emy Taylor, or Clarendon. How limpid the flow, how clear 
and logical the sequences' of the French- — how involved, in- 
verted, parenthetical, and obscure the stately march of the 
English composition. In the Ecclesiastical Polity, in the 
Areopagitica, in the Liberty of Prophesying, or in the History 
of the Rebellion, how few are the periods which fully convey 
their meaning, until they have been broken up by the student 
into their elementary sentences. In the Essays of Montaigne, 
or in the Provincial Letters, or in the Histoire des Variations, 
or in the Esprit des Lois, how laboriously must the reader 
search for so much as a single example of involution, inversion, 
or parenthesis ? I express no opinion on the comparative ex- 
cellence either of the two schools, or of their respective canons 
of criticism. I confine myself to the remark that, in this com- 
petition of the giants, the palm of habitually expressing the 
most profound thoughts in the most simple and intelligible 
forms of speech must be awarded, not to England, but to 
France. 

And such as are the giants in either host, such also, in their 
measure, are the innumerable dwarfs in each. In later times, 
indeed , the common herd of writers in both nations have af- 
fected a sort of chiaroscuro — the convenient shelter for mea- 
greness of thought and poverty of invention. For this degen- 
eracy we however are, I fear, far more deeply responsible than 
our neighbors. Darkened as the literary language of France 
has so often been by the fumes of undigested metaphysics, 
there is no author, and scarcely any reader there, who would 
not stand asjliast at the introduction into his native tongue of 



504 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

that inorganic language which even Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
himself tumbled out in some of his more elaborate speculations, 
and with which the imitators of that great man are at this day 
distorting and Grermanizing the speech of our progenitors. 

Now, as we are to infer from the style peculiar to France 
some of the distinguishing characteristics of the national mind, 
what are those distinctive qualities of the French people wliich 
have prescribed clearness and precision as the first and funda- 
m.ental law of all good or tolerable composition among them ? 
I answer, first, that in that law we have a proof of the genial, 
sympathetic, and communicative spirit which is their inalien- 
able birthright. The cloud-compelling Jupiter slu-ouded him- 
self in darkness, because he dwelt in an abstracted and silent 
solitude. But the Grod of day rejoiced in the light, because he 
was also the G-od of eloquence. Even so a G-erman will so 
often write obscurely, because his pleasure is in secluded rumi- 
nation. A Frenchman always writes clearly, because his hap- 
piness is in social and intellectual intercourse. The first calls 
up shadowy dreams not less with his pen than with his pipe. 
The other is engaged in the commerce of thought in his study 
not less than in the salon. And hence the immeasurable su- 
periority of the French to all other nations in social literature. 
What can be compared with the ease, the grace, the fascina- 
ting flow of their familiar letters ? except perhaps their histor- 
ical memoirs, which are, indeed, but another kind of familiar 
letters, addressed to society at large, by actors in the scene of 
public life, who have gladly escaped from its caution and re- 
serve to enjoy the freedom of colloquial intercourse. 

But such advantages are purchased at a price. The pro- 
pensity and the power thus to render literature subservient to 
the embellishment of life are continually tending to a fatal 
abuse. Recall the long series of men of genius, from Rabe- 
lais to Yoltaire, who, becoming the victims of their own arts 
of fascination, have so often debased history, philosophy, and 
religion itself to a frivolous pastime — the idle resource of the 
habitually idle. Remember how Bayle postpones every thing 
else to the amusement of his readers ; how Montesquieu strev/s 
the Esprit des Lois with epigi-ams ; and how even the illus- 
trious Paschal illuminates the most awful of all discussions 
with the charms of his mimitable irony. Conjecture (for it 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 505 

is hopeless to measure) the dimensions of those pyramids of 
contes, novels, romances, fictitious memoirs, comedies, and 
vaudevilles, which the pens of French men and women have 
piled up with such a prodigality of labor and of talent ; and 
then confess that, if the passion to captivate and to be captiva- 
ted has rendered the style of France pellucid, it has also con- 
tributed not a little to render much of her literature frivolous. 

The exquisite perspicuity of the French written language 
is farther the index of the predominance in the French mind 
of the reasoning faculty ; of that faculty which, with truth for 
its object, and logic for its guide, strives to fathom all the 
depths, and to scale all the heights of human knowledge, and 
therefore wages an inappeasable war against all the powers of 
mental darkness. The most subtle of analysts, the French- 
man dissects liis ideas into thek component parts with a touch 
at once so delicate and so firm as almost to justify his exult- 
ing comparison of his own vocabulary with that of Athens. 
The most perspicuous of experimentalists, he explores with the 
keenest glance all the phenomena from which his conclusions 
are to be derived. The most precise of logicians, he reasons 
from such premises with the most undiscolored mental vision. 
The most aspiring of theorists, he fixes an eagle gaze on the 
highest eminences of thought, and passes from one mountain-top 
of speculation to another with a vigor and an ease peculiar to 
himself. And hence it has happened that the writers of France 
have become either the teachers or the interpreters of science 
and of philosophy to the world at large ; that their civil juris- 
prudence forms the most simple and comprehensive of all exist- 
ing codes of law ; and that their historians, their moralists, and 
their poets breathe freely in a transcendental atmosphere too 
rare and attenuated to sustain the intellectual life of grosser 
minds than theirs. 

And as their luminousness of style results from clearness of 
conception, and that clearness of conception from logical ex- 
actness, so that logical exactness, combinmg with the social 
spirit of the people, has rendered them the greatest of all mod- 
ern masters in the art of rhetoric. For eloquence is well 
defined as " ignited logic ;" and to the French speaker, logic 
supplies the fuel, and a genial sympathy the flame of elo- 
quence. The sermons of the pulpits of France, the eloges of 



// 



506 POWER OF THE PEN IN FP^ANCE. 

her academies, the discourses of her judges, the debates of her 
States-G-eneral, of her Parliaments, and of her Legislative As- 
semblies ; nay, even the declamations of her Revolutionary 
clubs all attest that, in every age and in every theatre, her or- 
ators have been gifted with admirable powers of agitating and 
subduing the wills of the crowds which have gathered round 
them. 

But this logical structure of the understanding of our neigh- 
bors, while at once generating their characteristic perspicuity 
of style, and attested by it, has also given birth to that re- 
morseless Erg'oisme (no language but their own could have 
found place for such a word) by which they are no less dis- 
tinguished. The helpless slaves of syllogism, they advance 
with unflinching intrepidity to any consequence, however start- 
ling, which seems to them legitimately to emerge from what- 
ever they regard as well-established premises ; while they re- 
ject, with equal hardihood, any doctrine, however invaluable, 
which can not be so demonstrated. They are Rationalists in 
the correct sense of that much misused expression. That is, 
they are more than skeptical of all conclusions which unaided 
reason can not reach, even though they may be reached by the 
aid of those guides, of which Reason herself has taught the 
need and the authority. They condemn, as unmeaning or su- 
perstitious, every opinion which can not be enounced in terms 
perfectly unambiguous, even when such opinions are conver- 
sant with topics beyond the range of human observation and 
of man's experience. He who would estimate the extent to 
which such Pyrrhonism infects and degrades much of the lit- 
erature of Prance, must pass a larg'e part of his life in read- 
ing books, the knowledge of which a good man would regret, 
and a wise and humble man avoid. 

In that invariable transparency of style in which the sense 
of all eminent French writers is conveyed to us, we may, I 
think, farther discover the ancient, and even yet unsubdued 
propensity of their nation and of themselves to submit to 
established authority. In a jargon as new as it is offensive, 
the sacred right of insurrection has, indeed, been loudly pro- 
claimed in our own days. But, from the days of Hugues Ca- 
pet to those of Louis XYL, it was at once the pride and the 
habit of the French people to bow to law, or to the semblance 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 507 

of law, with an almost Oriental subserviency. This national 
docility was the basis on which the Capetian kings, and the 
literary dictators of France, alike erected their absolute domin- 
ion. Hence that subordination of the individual characteristics 
of French writers to the generic characteristics of French lit- 
erature. Hence it is that, in their external forms, history, po- 
etry, philosophy, and even romance, ever correspond in France 
to certain elementary types, which the law of letters there has 
prescribed ; and that, like so many crystals, each species is cast 
in its own normal mold, while all the species exhibit the same 
invariable transparency. The humblest writer for the tragic 
stage still works upon the model of the Cid or Athalie. The 
remembrance of the Misanthrope, or Les Joueurs, restrains 
him who would impart a new demeanor to comedy. Every 
new philosopher must imitate the method of Des Cartes ; and 
Bourdaloue, to this moment, gives the law to all the pulpits 
of Paris. 

That this conformity of the literature of France to the estab- 
lished canons of French criticism rescues the inferior artists 
from much extravagance and from many deformities, can not 
be disputed ; though it may, not unreasonably, be questioned 
whether this advantage is not purchased at too dear a rate ; 
for that docility, and the transparent clearness of style to which 
all candidates for fame aspire as the one indispensable condi- 
tion of success, indicate, if they do not also promote, the pre- 
vailing absence of the higher powers of the imagination. The 
Ossianic hero, whose dwelling is in the shadows and the mists, 
is haunted by spectres which are at once his terror, his delight, 
and his inspiration. As he draws nearer to the south, he 
quits them for objects more definite in form, more bright in 
coloring, but of far less power to agitate his bosom or to kindle 
his enthusiasm. So in those sunny latitudes of thought in 
which the French intellect finds its habitual and favorite abode, 
though there be neither clouds to overcast nor vapors to ob- 
scure the prospect, yet neither are there to be found those 
magical illusions which impart to more sombre skies their 
deep and mysterious significance. Though France herself de- 
nies, yet all other nations with one voice proclaim her inferi- 
ority to her rivals in poetry and romance, and in all the other 
elevated fields of fiction. A French Dante, or Michael Angelo, 



508 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

or Cervantes, or Murillo, or Groetlie, or Shakspeare, or Milton, 
we at once perceive to be a mere anomaly ; a supposition 
which may indeed he proposed in terms, hut which, in reality, 
is inconceivable and impossible. 

I trust that I shall not appear to have been seduced by these 
more alluring topics from my proposed and proper inquiry into 
the influence of the literature of France upon her civil polity. 
The first and most essential step toward the solution of that 
problem is to determine by what peculiarities that literature 
is characterized. The second is to estimate (in however brief 
and cursory a manner) the genius of each of those illustrious 
men who have left upon the national mind the indelible im- 
press of their imperishable labors. If (as I observed in my 
last lecture) we can attain to some just appreciation of those 
patriarchal spirits, we shall understand their less-gifted de- 
scendants, sufficiently, at least, for the purpose which I have 
immediately in view ; for the hereditary resemblance, or the in- 
dispensable imitation, may, as I have formerly stated, be traced 
with little difficulty from the intellectual ancestor throughout 
the whole of his intellectual lineage. To this attempt I will, 
therefore, now address myself. 

Joinville, the son of the Senechal of Champagne, was born 
near the commencement of the thirteenth century, and was 
educated at the courts of Troyes and Provins ; where, at that 
time, minstrelsy and music rendered the homage in which 
greatness delights, while they received, in turn, the homage 
which genius demands. Joinville listened to those strains, and 
probably applauded them ; for he writes as a worshiper of the 
harmonious and the beautiful ; but he did not imitate them. 
Having succeeded to the senechaussee of Champagne, he be- 
came esquire carver to St. Louis, and, at his summons, joined 
that illustrious host which divided, with their royal leader, all 
the calamities of his Egyptian campaign and of his inactive 
exile in the Holy Land. But the enthusiasm of loyalty in 
Joinville, though sustained by dreams of an Oriental princi- 
pality, proved less enduring than the enthusiasm of religion in 
St. Louis, sustained as it was by the unfaltering hope of an 
eternal recompense. The senechal, therefore, declined to ac- 
company his master in his expedition to Tunis ; but in the 
reign of Louis X., and at the age of more than ninety, dictated 



iB 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 509 

to an amanuensis the story, wliicli lie had douhtless often tolJ 
before to his associates, of his friendship, his conversations, and 
his campaigns with the canonized king. That story has sur- 
vived to our own days as a cherished part of the intellectual 
patrimony of the French people. In those pages, the gallant 
and affectionate, but worldly-minded knight, and the magnan- 
imous, pensive, and unworldly king, are so skillfully contrast- 
ed, and the virtues and infirmities of each are so reflected and 
relieved by the other, that no one can contemplate them in that 
exquisite, though unlabored composition, without understand- 
ing and admiring, without condemning and forgiving, and lov- 
ing them both. Over the whole picture the genial spirit of 
France glows with all the natural warmth which we seek in 
vain among the dry bones of the earlier chroniclers. Without 
the use of any didactic forms of speech, Joinville teaches the 
highest of all wisdom — ^the wisdom of love. Without the ped- 
antry of the schools, he occasionally exhibits an eager thirst for 
knowledge, and a graceful facility of imparting it, which at- 
test that he is of the lineage of the great father of history, and 
of those modern historians who have taken Herodotus for their 
model. 

At the distance of eighty-six years from the completion of the 
Memorials of Joinville appeared the yet more popular Chroni- 
cles of Froissart. The son of an heraldic painter, and born at 
Valenciennes, he was familiar from his childhood with the em- 
blems of seignorial dignity, and with the martial achievements 
on the French and Flemish frontiers. He became, however, 
not a soldier, but a priest ; and then (such were the habits of 
his times) obtained distinction as a writer of erotic poetry. His 
verses appear to have recommended him to the favor of Philip- 
pa of Hainault, the queen of Edward HI., and, by her bounty, 
he was enabled to travel through France and England, where 
(as he says) he met with more than two hundred great princes, 
and collected intelligence on all sides ; for Froissart was the 
fu'st of those French authors who have followed literature as 
their chief and peculiar calling. The earlier chroniclers had 
been either the narrators of what they had seen, or the tran- 
scribers or abbreviators of what they had read. He, on the 
other hand, made it the business of his life to gather, from the 
captains or the princes of his age, the materials for the com- 



510 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

memoration of their exploits. Such information could not, of 
coursej be so collected and employed without some sacrifice of 
historical fidelity. But if he is sometimes unjust in the dis- 
tribution of praise or blame, he is perfectly accurate in the de- 
lineation of the world in which he lived. He is not the apol- 
ogist, but the enthusiast, of the age of chivalry. He does not 
exaggerate its virtues, for he could conceive of none more ex- 
alted ; nor does he cancel its faults, for he was blind to then* 
deformity. 

For the task which he had undertaken he was qualified, not 
only by his restless activity and zeal, but by a retentive mem- 
ory, a luminous understanding, a creative fancy, and an abso- 
lute exemption from all national prejudices ; for, though the 
Duke of Burgundy was the superior lord, and the King of 
France the suzerain of his native city, yet Froissart considered 
himself neither as a Burgundian nor as a Frenchman, but as 
the subject of the Count of Namur, the immediate superior of 
Yalenciennes. He wrote, therefore, not as a partisan, but as 
a cosmopolite. He also wrote, not as a philosopher, but as a 
painter of the great military spectacle of his age, in all its shift- 
ing aspects, in all its brilliant colors, and in all its ceaseless 
variety ; and on that canvas he had the genius to group all 
the chivalry and the heroism — all the battles and the sieges — 
all the fetes and the tournaments of that agitated period, each 
in a mellow light, each in its due subordination to the rest, 
and each with a breadth of touch and a truth of perspective 
which redeems that vast array of figures and that boundless 
complexity of action from the reproach of confusion or disor- 
der. In the art of picturesque writing, Froissart is not only 
without an equal, but without a competitor. In the art of 
narrative he has been surpassed by many, though even in his 
narration the spirit of his native land may be distinguished 
in the clearness and the natural sequence of his story, in the 
graceful adjustment of the several parts of it to each other, in 
the absence both of tumor in his pathetic passages, and of ex- 
aggeration in his historical incidents, and in the easy and un- 
ostentatious structure of the language in which his chronicle 
is composed. 

He is, however, only a chronicler. Philippe de Comines is 
the earliest writer in the French tona^ue who was entitled to 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 511 

assume the loftier title of an historian. Froissart had depict- 
ed great events ; De Comines delineated great men. The one 
had contemplated the strife of kings and kingdoms as a spec- 
tator of the Isthmian games may have gazed at that heart-stir- 
ring spectacle. The other had watched the schemes of states- 
men and the conflict of nations with some approach to that 
judicial serenity which we ascribe to a member of the Ara- 
phictionic Council. Yet De Comines can hardly be said to 
have been an impartial judge between the princes who suc- 
cessively enjoyed his aid and his allegiance. He regards 
Charles the Rash with that affectionate interest which the 
heroism even of the unwise will excite in the bosoms of the 
wisest. He contemplates Louis XI. with that combination of 
curiosity, of attachment, and of awe, which minds of more 
than ordinary power so often cherish for each other. The im- 
ages of the fiery duke and of the crafty king were projected in 
bold relief in the imagination of this acute and vigilant ob- 
server, and the truth and distinctness of those images forms 
the great charm of his retrospect of his own eventful life. The 
higher charm of a just sensibility, whether to moral beauty 
or to the absence of it, is, however, wanting in his pages. 
Whether we study the successive masters of De Comines as 
described by him, or himself as incidentally pourtrayed in his 
delineation of those remarkable persons, we are reminded that 
both they and he were living in an age when Machiavelli was 
the teacher of princes, and when he numbered among his dis- 
ciples not only Louis of France, but our own Richard III., and 
the houses of Borgia and of the Medici. Profound and saga- 
cious as he was, De Comines could neither serve such a sover- 
eign, nor breathe the moral atmosphere of such times with 
impunity. He is the unqualified admirer, if not the unscru- 
pulous apologist, of his royal master ; and seems insensible 
alike to the injustice of the ends at which he aimed, and to 
the baseness of the means by which he pursued them. Yet 
man is not less inconsistent in his faults and errors than in his 
virtues ; and thus even the utilitarian De Comines is unable 
to survey the revolutions in which he so largely participated 
without an occasional, and apparently a heartfelt acknowledg- 
ment that, in bringing to pass the disastrous catastrophe of the 
world's history, the will and the agency of man are but in- 



512 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

struments by which the Divine will accomplishes its immuta- 
ble purposes of wisdom and of justice. In the subtlety of his 
analysis of the great characters of his generation — in the force 
and discrimination of his portraits of them — in the sagacity 
with which he explores, and the perspicuity with which he in- 
terprets, the hidden causes of the events in which they acted 
-^and in his vigorous dispersion of the mists with which ig- 
norance or passion obscures the true aspects of human affairs, 
De Commes is emphatically a Frenchman. In the reverence 
with which, on reaching the impassable limits of human in- 
vestigation, he ceases to inquire, and pauses to adore, he rises 
higher still, and becomes, not only a citizen, but a teacher of 
the great Christian commonwealth. 

This great triumvirate of French literature before the Re- 
formation (Joinville, Froissart, and De Comines) were not more 
exempt than their contemporaries from the bondage of Papal 
Rome. With the fall of spiritual freedom had fallen also the 
freedom of the intellect. As religion, which is the love of Grod 
and of man, had been darkened by superstition, so philosophy, 
which is the knowledge of G-od and man, had been buried 
under the dialectics of the school. The students of the Mid- 
dle Ages had been thus inexorably debarred from those bound- 
less fields of inquiry into the origin, the nature, the duties, and 
the destination of our race, in which the sages of Grreece and 
the Fathers of the Church had consumed their laborious lives. 
All moral truths had passed into so many articles of the faith. 
All articles of faith had been reduced into so many dogmatic 
formulas, and all those formulas had the syllogism for their 
common basis. To multiply such formulas by the multipli- 
cation of such syllogisms was the single exercise left open to 
inventive minds ; and to minds not inventive it was permit- 
ted only to accept, to remember, and to repeat those peremp- 
tory conclusions of the schoolmen. The great end and object 
of their teaching was to convert the human mind into an in- 
tellectual mechanism, by which the same or similar conse- 
quences would infallibly, and at all times, be reproduced from 
the same established premises ; and while, to satisfy that crav- 
ing for general principles which is the indestructible instinct 
of our nature, the Church of Rome thus employed her array 
of doctors, seraphic and irrefragible, she also employed the 



POWER OF THE PEN IN PRANCE. 513 

scourge, the prison, and the brand to silence those who pre- 
sumed to quench that sacred thirst by ascending for them- 
selves to the fountains of truth which G-od has opened, both 
in the Book of Life and in his unwritten revelations in the hu- 
man heart. For these reasons it is that Joinville and Frois- 
sart skim so lightly, though so gracefully, over the surface of 
the great social movements which they record, and that even 
De Comines makes no attempt to draw any solution of the 
great problems lying in his path from those depths with which 
the theology and the philosophy of later times have rendered 
our modern historians even ostentatiously familiar. 

With the revival of letters, a mighty change came over the 
spirit of the literature of France. The first and immediate 
effect, indeed, was to provoke a rapturous and extravagant 
imitation of the Grreek and Latin models. G-ray-headed men 
went to school to study Cicero and Homer. To satisfy the 
demand for such knowledge, Henry Stephen and Erasmus be- 
came at once writers and compositors for the press. Athenian 
and Roman costumes fluttered through the streets and the sa- 
lons of Paris. A Macedonian phalanx was em-olled out of the 
French army ; and, at the approach of death, learned men 
imitated the dying declamations of Cato and Antoninus. 

But then came the Reformation, not only to sweep away 
these follies, but also to dispel many other errors far more for- 
midable than these. The alliance between Christian antiquity 
and Pagan antiquity triumphed over the fictitious traditions 
of the Church and the oscillating logic of the School. The 
Decretals of Isidore, and the Summa Theologise of St. Thomas 
Aquinas, retreated into the limbo of dethroned and departed 
idols. The human mind once more breathed freely, and men 
of genius appeared to give utterance to the thoughts and feel- 
ings of an emancipated world. 

I almost hesitate to pronounce, in immediate juxtaposition, 
the names of the second great literary triumvirate, who, in the 
sixteenth century, assumed that high office in France. Yet 
it is, I think, but an apparent paradox to assert that between 
Rabelais, Calvin, and Montaigne, the parallelisms are as re- 
markable as the contradictions. 

Rabelais, the son of an inn-keeper at Chinon, was born at 
that place in the year 1483. He became a Franciscan friar, 

Kk 



514 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

a" deacon, and a priest in holy orders ; and then, at the mature 
age of forty-two, commenced the study of medicine in the col- 
lege at Montpellier. Various medical treatises were the fruit 
of those labors ; and the reputation derived from them was 
sufficient to obtain for him the office of physician to the pub- 
lic hospital at Lyons. But his professional books proving un- 
saleable, Rabelais, to indemnify his bookseller, wrote and pub- 
lished his Pantagruel, or Chronique G-argantuine, of which (as 
he says) more copies were sold in two months than of the Bible 
in ten years. Having thus discovered the secret of his power, 
/. he next produced the G-argantua ; the work which has secured 
for him the admiration of all subsequent ages, though the rev- 
erence of none. It is a romance in which Babelais may be 
considered as depicting the habits, opinions, errors, crimes, and 
follies of that age of religious and intellectual revolutions, in 
the centre of which he lived. Yet the critics have doubted, 
and must ever continue to doubt, whether Grargantua and his 
son Pantagruel are actual portraits of those who led the arma- 
ments (literary, theological, or military) of those times, or are 
mere impersonations of those abstract qualities by which the 
world was then governed ; whether Panurge and Friar John 
had any living prototypes among the men of the sixteenth cen- 
tury ; or whether the one is but a name for mediocrity, ceas- 
ing to be honest as it becomes conspicuous, and the other a 
name for sensuality, rescued from contempt by a shrewd and 
jovial spirit. But why investigate these and such other rid- 
dles, proposed by their author in avowed defiance of any such 
attempt ? Why, indeed, read at all a book of which not only 
the general scope, but almost every page, is enigmatical ? "Why 
squander time and patience on a writer who, of set purpose, 
makes his readers dependent on the guidance of some dull and 
doubtful commentator ? I have no answer to 'these questions, 
or can answer them only by very earnestly dissuading the pe- 
rusal of the lives of Pantagruel and G-argantua ; for those pas- 
sages which do reward the toil of the student are separated 
from each other, not only by this profound obscure, but by foul 
abysses of impurity, which no skill or caution can always suc- 
ceed in overleaping. I know not how to describe them in terms 
at once accurate and decorous, except by borrowing Mr. Car- 
lyle's denunciation of a work of Diderot's, and saying with 



J 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 515 

liim, or in words resembling his, that he who, even undesign- 
edly, shall come into contact with these parts of Rabelais's 
great work, should forthwith plunge into running waters, and 
regard himself, for the rest of the day, as something more than 
ceremonially unclean. 

Yet he whose business or whose determination it is to ap- 
preciate aright the civil, and therefore the literary history of 
France, must needs pay this heavy price of knowledge ; for, 
in that history, the romance of G-argantua is an indispensable 
link. From the revival of heathen antiquity, Rabelais had 
gathered a mass of learning resembling the diet of his own 
Pantagruel, who had 4600 cows milked every morning for his 
breakfast. From the revival of Christian antiquity, he had 
learned to despise the authority and the superstitions of the 
Church of Rome, without, at the same time, learning to rev- 
erence the authority and the doctrines of the Grospel. He thus 
traversed the boundless expanse of human knowledge without 
the chart or compass which may be discovered only in that 
knowledge which is not human, but divine. He traversed it 
under the guidance of his own wit, sagacity, and humor ; a 
v>dt vaulting at a bound from the arctic to the antarctic poles 
of thought ; a sagacity embracing all the higher questions of 
man's social existence, and many of the deeper problems of 
his moral constitution ; and a humor which fairly baffles all 
attempts to analyze or to describe it ; for it was the result, not 
of natural temperament alone, but also of the most assiduous 
and severe studies. The language of Grreece had become as 
familiar to him as his mother tongue ; and while he learned 
from G-alen and Hippocrates to investigate the properties of liv- 
ing or of inert matter, he was trained by Plato to spiritual med- 
itation, and by Lucian to a skepticism and a buffoonery alike 
audacious and unintermitted. From the union of such a dis- 
position and of such discipline emerged the strange phenomenon 
of a philosopher in his revels. In contemplating it, one knows 
not, as it has been well said, " whether to wonder most that 
such wisdom should ever assume the mask of folly, or that 
such folly should permit the gi-owth and development of any 
true wisdom." It is, however, an apparent rather than a real 
difficulty. The wisdom is never sublime, and the folly but 
seldom abject. Each is but a different aspect of a nature, of 



516 POWEROF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

wliich the parts are, indeed, inharmonious ^ hut not incompati- 
})\q — of a genuine Epicurean gifted with gigantic powers, but 
of cold affections and of debased appetites ; ever worshiping 
and obeying his one idol, pleasure, though at one time she bids 
him soar to the empyrean, and at another commands him to 
wallow in the sty. ' 

Rabelais was wise in the sense in which any man may be 
so who delights in the strenuous exercise of a powerful under- 
standing, and loves thinking for thinking's sake. He was wise 
to detect popular fallacies and to discern unpopular truths. 
He was wise to see how the young might be better educated, 
laws better made, nations better governed, wars more vigor- 
ously conducted, and peace more securely maintained. He 
was wise to call down both theology and philosophy from the 
skies above to the earth beneath us. And he was not more 
wise than eloquent ; sometimes arraying truth in the noblest 
forms of speech, though more frequently enhancing her beauty 
by enveloping and contrasting her with the homeliest. At his 
prolific touch his native tongue germinated into countless new 
varieties of expression ; and the mines of wealth, both intel- 
lectual and verbal, which he bequeathed to future ages, after 
being wrought by multitudes in each, still appear inexhaustible. 

The wisdom of Rabelais was, however, of the world, world- 
ly. It never ascended to the eternal fountains of light, nor 
descended to illuminate the dark places of the earth. It nei- 
ther sought to interpret the awful mysteries of our nature, nor 
bowed down to adore in the contemplation of them. It aimed 
at no exalted ends, nor did it ever lead the way through any 
rugged and self-denying paths. It expressed neither sympathy 
for the wretchedness, nor pity for the sorrows of mankind, but 
was satisfied to be shrewd, and witty, and comical upon them 
all. To the keen gaze of Rabelais, the frauds, and follies, and 
ignorance, and licentiousness of the Papal court and priesthood 
afforded endless matter of scorn and merriment ; but to his last 
hour he lived in their outward garb and communion. To that 
penetrating eye had been clearly revealed the majesty of the 
truth which the Reformers taught, and the majesty of the suf- 
ferings which they endured in its defense ; but not one glow 
of enthusiasm could they ever kindle in his bosom, as they 
toiled in indigence, and died in martyrdom, to evangelize the 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE, 517 

world. Secure in the absolution of Clement YIL for whatever 
he had done and written against the Church, and secure in the 
license of Francis I. to publish whatever else he might please, 
Rabelais delighted to assume the character of a chartered liber- 
tine, or, as it might almost be said, of an intellectual debau- 
chee. And yet, voluptuary, scoffer, and skeptic as he was, his 
laughter was so hearty, his glee so natural, his frolic so riotous, 
and his buffoonery so irresistible, that he became, not merely 
the tolerated, but the favored and privileged Momus of his times. 
He became also a proof to all later times that, by the great mass 
of mankind, any thing will be forgiven or permitted to genius, 
when, abandoning its native supremacy, it condescends to un- 
dertake the strangely inappropriate office of master of the revels. 

In thus dwelling on the literary career of Rabelais, my ob- 
ject, however, has chiefly been to show how it illustrates the 
predominance, in all the great authors of France, of the same 
essential characteristics. His possession and abuse of their 
logical sphit conducted him to skepticism, if not to infidelity. 
His possession and abuse of their sympathetic spirit immersed 
him in a ceaseless bacchanalian riot. Deep and fatal are the 
traces of his example and of his fame in the literary history of 
his native land. With him commences the lineage of those 
eminent spirits who have waged war in France against the moral 
and religious convictions, and even against the social decencies 
of the Christian world ; a war productive of some of the sorest 
troubles, or, rather, let us say, of some of the heaviest chastise- 
ments which have rebuked the offenses of the nations of modern 
Europe. 

If it were my object to show how contrarieties are related, 
I know not how I could better accomplish it than by the im- 
mediate transition which my subject compels me to make from 
Francis Rabelais to John Calvin ; for, probably, no two men 
of commanding minds were ever more curiously contrasted 
with each other, as certainly no two minds were ever enshrin- 
ed in bodies more dissimilar. To look upon, Rabelais was a 
drunken Silenus, Calvin a famished Ugolino. The one emp- 
tied his bottle before he wrote, while he was writing, and after 
he had written ; the other contented himself with a repast of 
bread and water once in each six-and-thirty hours. Reposing 
in his easy chair, the merry doctor was hailed as lord of mis- 



518 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

rule by all the jovial spirits of his age ; enthroned in the con- 
sistory of G-eneva, the inexorable divine was dreaded as the 
disciplinarian of himself and of the whole subject city. The 
witty physician was L'Allegro, the austere minister II Pense- 
roso, of their generation. The reader of the Grargantua yields 
by turns to disgust, to admiration, and to merriment; but 
Democritus himself would not have found matter for one pass- 
ing smile throughout the whole of the Christian Institute. To 
Rabelais, human life appeared a farce as broad as the knights 
of Aristophanes ; to Calvin, a tragedy more dismal than the 
Agamemnon of ^schylus. And as they wrote, so they also 
lived. The traditional stories about Rabelais, if true, attest 
his love, and, even if untrue, they attest his reputed love, of 
that kind of wit which is called practical ; all the traditions 
of Calvin represent him as a man at whose appearance mirth 
instantly took flight. The gay doctor is made in these tales 
to play off his tricks on the graduates in medicine, on the Chan- 
cellor du Prat, on the .King and Queen of France, and even 
on the mule of the Pope himself ; while the solemn theologian 
makes his domiciliatory visits to ascertain that no dinner-table 
at G-eneva was rendered the pretext for levity of discourse or 
for excess of diet. 

What, then, is the congruity on which to found any com- 
parison between these most incongruous minds ? The answer 
is (to borrow the word once more), that they were both de-« 
voted erg'oists, each of them being at once a mighty master 
and a submissive slave of logic. To what strange extrava- 
gances it conducted or accompanied Rabelais, I have already 
attempted to show ; the consequences to which it impelled 
Calvin were of far deeper significance. 

The great Saxon patriarch of the Reformation had known 
neither the same mastery nor the same bondage. From the 
Inspired Volume, indeed, Luther had deduced the doctrines 
of the churches destined to bear his name. But as his medi- 
tations on it led him farther and farther from the tenets and 
usages of the Church of Ptome, he paused. He had been borne 
onward till he came in sight of conclusions against which his 
heart reclaimed, and of practices against which his conscience 
protested. At the bidding of those remonstrances, he was con- 
tent to be inconclusive, if not illogical. He had left no errors 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 519 

unassailed, "bvit was content to leave many trutlis undecided. 
He had drawn from his Bible principles, the more remote con- 
sequences of which he did not attempt to draw. He had learn- 
ed many lessons of tolerance and some of indifference ; and, if 
he were now living among us, would hardly escape being stig- 
matized as a latitudinarian for that dislike of religious dog- 
matism, and that disregard of the varieties of external observ- 
ances in public worship which marked his declining years. 

Most dissimilar were the spirit and the conduct of John Cal- 
vin. BefoTe him, also, lay the Inspired Yolume. He looked 
on it as containing not merely the chief, but rather the only 
premises from which the truths of Christianity coiild be either 
learned or inferred, "While he was composing his great work 
Luther was still alive. But they who are, or who claim to be, 
most familiar with his writings, assert that no mention of the 
great G-erman Reformer occurs in any part of them. If so, 
this remarkable silence may probably be referred, partly to the 
self-complacent nationality and contempt for the foreigner so 
common to almost all French writers, but still more to his de- 
termination to traverse the vast ocean of theology unaided by 
the charts of any preceding navigator. He seems to have 
adopted the Baconian apophthegm, that " from any one truth 
all truth may be inferred ;" but with the addition, that these 
all-embracing mferences must be drawn by no other hand than 
that of John Calvin himself. There is something even sublime 
in the courage with which his unaverted eye confronts every 
difficulty, however formidable, and contemplates every conse- 
quence, however repulsive. Without presuming to hazard any 
opinion on the truth of his peculiar system, and not even pre- 
tending to understand it aright, I can yet perceive that, from 
his apparent meaning, any less intrepid logician than himself 
must have turned aside with many painful misgivings. Yet 
I so much distrust my own ability to exhibit an exact sum- 
mary of his doctrines, that, declining any such attempt, I shall 
entirely rely on the construction which they have usually re- 
ceived, not less from his friends than from his enemies. He 
not only advances from the gTeat article of justification by faith 
alone to a denial of the ground on which the necessity of a holy 
life had been maintained by the Roman Church, but see^ns to 
place that necessity on grounds alike insecure and unintelligi- 



520 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

ble. He seems to deduce from that article the opinion that 
penitence is impossible to the unregenerate, and useless to the 
elect. He seems to ascribe to the Holy Scriptures the doctrine 
of an absolute fatalism. He seems to discover in them the 
revelation of the awful dogma, that He who is love has called 
into being a large part of the race of man, foredoomed, by his 
own immutable decree, to an eternal existence of hopeless 
misery. He seems to interpret the word of G-od as teaching 
that the Church and the State are not two bodies in alliance 
with, or distinct from each other, but the same body, one and 
indivisible ; and that, therefore, all legitimate human govern- 
ment is, in effect, a theocracy. He found, or supposed him- 
self to find, in his Bible, that episcopacy was a human, a need- 
less, or an injurious invention; that holy orders could not be 
effectually transmitted from one generation of Christian min- 
isters to another ; that the baptismal font was superfluous ; 
the use of unleavened bread in the holy eucharist supersti- 
tious ; the reverence of that sacrament as a divine mystery, to 
a great extent, a human figment ; the festivals of the Church 
an abuse ; and her ancient ceremonials an unmeaning panto- 
mime. Thus taking away the support which feeble man de- 
mands under the burden of a pure and absolute spiritualism, 
he stood erect and triumphant amid the wreck of the ecclesi- 
astical opinions, institutions, and observances of by-gone ages ; 
but not of ecclesiastical opinions alone. Under his guidance, 
and by a still farther use of his remorseless logic, the secular 
commonwealth also was shaken to its foundations. Greneva 
became the cradle of revolt against half the monarchies of Eu- 
rope ; and, under the various names of Presbyterians, Insur- 
gents, Gueux, Huguenots, and Puritans, his disciples in Scot- 
land, in the United Provinces, in France, and in England, 
proved their fidelity to the political doctrines, and even to the 
example of the great founder of Calvinism. 

If it were admitted that all the links of Calvin's argument- 
ation were as indissoluble as he supposed them to be, it would 
still remain to inquire whether his opinions are not refuted by 
the nature of the inferences with which they were thus preg- 
nant ; for the reasoning faculty is not the only light, nor is it 
even the surest of the lights, given to man for his guidance 
amid the shadows which encircle him. We accept the conclu- 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 521 

sions of our reason, because the laws and structure of our na- 
ture render it inevitable. We accept the assurances of our 
moral instincts for the very same reason. But there can be no 
conflicting necessities. There is, indeed, no meaning in any 
such words. Never yet did Nature say one thing, and Reason 
say another. Those voices are in eternal harmony, though to 
us they may occasionally seem at discord. When such a seem- 
ing dissonance arises, a wise man will consider whether it is 
not more probable that his syllogisms are vulnerable, than that 
his heart misinterprets the law written on it by God himself. 
In the strength of our instincts, he has graciously provided a 
compensation for the weakness of our intellects. The best 
reasoned is not always the most reasonable conclusion ; and 
when, from any logical conclusion, the soul and conscience re- 
coil, we may well believe that there is some real, though la- 
tent error, either in the basis on which we have argued, or the 
superstructure of argument which we have erected upon it. 

Calvin admitted no such belief. He took no security against 
the illusions of logic. He vindicated the tyranny of reason 
over each man, and of the reason of John Calvin over all men. 
And they who, like him, are by their birthright the intellectual 
sovereigns of our race, have ever been greeted by the subject 
multitude with applause, or rather with exultation, even when 
their lawful authority has passed into a lawless despotism. 
His Institution Chretienne was, therefore, received with un- 
bounded delight. We may, indeed, reject the story that a 
thousand editions of it were sold in his own life-time ; but we 
can not dispute that, during a century and a half, it exercised 
an unrivaled supremacy over a large part of Protestant Europe. 
For that dominion it was indebted, in part, to the novelty and 
comprehensiveness of the design it accomplished ; to the vast 
compass of learning, scriptural, patristic, and historical, which 
it embraced ; to the depth and the height of the morality which 
it inculcated ; and to the calm but energetic keenness with 
which it exposed the errors of his adversaries. But the popu- 
larity and the influence of this remarkable book is also, in part, 
to be ascribed to its literary merits. Calvin has been described 
as the Bossuet of his age. Of all the French authors whom 
France had as yet produced, he was the most philosophical 
when he speculated, the most sublime when he adored, the 



522 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE, 

most methodical and luminous in tlie development of truth, 
the most acute in the refutation of error, and the most obedi- 
ent to that law or spirit of his nation which demands symme- 
try in the proportions, harmony in the details, and concert in 
all the parts of every work of art, whether it be wrought by 
the pen, the pencil, or the chisel. In the ninth chapter of 
Bossuet's Histoire des Variations may indeed be found the best, 
as it is a very reluctg,nt, eulogy on the literary excellence of 
his great rival and predecessor. Even in the haughty gloom 
which the Bishop of Meaux discovers in the style and- tone of 
the Reformer of Greneva, there is a not inappropriate interest. 
The beautiful lake of that city, and the mountains which en- 
circle it, lay before his eyes as he wrote ; but they are said to 
have suggested to his fancy no images, and to have drawn from 
his pen not so much as one transient allusion. With his men- 
tal vision ever directed to that melancholy view of the state 
and prospects of our race which he had discovered in the Book 
of Life, it would, indeed, have been incongruous to have turned 
aside to depict any of those glorious aspects of the creative be- 
nignity which were spread around him in the Book of Nature. 
Whatever else may have been the merits of the Calvinistic 
system, it at least failed to impart elasticity to the spirits, or 
freedom to the thoughts of those who first embraced it. After 
the rise and fall of a few generations, it even failed to retain 
them within the precincts of evangelical truth, and the doc- 
trines of Socinus at length superseded those of Calvin, not only 
in New England, in France, and in Switzerland, but even in 
his own G-eneva. On a future occasion I may, perhaps, at- 
tempt to show how this degeneracy had its root in the despotic 
logic of the founder of those churches. My more immediate 
purpose is to trace out the progress of that despotism in the 
literature of his native country. 

As in most other tyrannies, so in this, the immediate effect 
of the servitude into which Calvin had subdued the minds of 
his disciples was to provoke a formidable revolt. When he 
was giving his latest touches to his Institution Chretienne, 
Michel de Montaigne, then in his twenty-second year, had just 
taken his seat in the Parliament of Bordeaux. That he after- 
ward became a deputy in the States-Greneral of Blois, though 
maintained by no inconsiderable authorities, seems to me im- 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 523 

possible ; but it is clear that bis early manhood was devoted to 
public, and especially to judicial affairs. He was thus brought 
into contact with the busy world at the moment of a gi-eater 
agitation of human society than had occurred since the over- 
throw of the Roman empire. Marvelous revolutions, and dis- 
coveries still more marvelous in the world of letters, of politics, 
of geogTaphy, and of religion ; the warfare of inappeasable pas- 
sions ; the working of whatever is most base and of whatever 
is most sublime in our common nature ; and calamities which 
might seem to have fulfilled the most awful of the apocalyptic 
visions had passed in rapid succession before the eyes of this 
acute and curious observer. It was an unwelcome and repuls- 
ive spectacle. He turned from it to seek the shelter and the 
repose of his hereditary mansion. In that retirement he in- 
dulged or cherished a spirit inflexibly opposed to the spirit by 
which his native country was convulsed. The age was idol- 
atrous of novelties, and therefore Montaigne lived in the ret- 
rospect of a remote antiquity. It was an age of restless am- 
bition, and therefore he passively committed himself and his 
fortunes to the current of events. The minds of other men 
were exploring the foundations and criticising the superstruct- 
ure of every social polity, and therefore his mind was averted 
altogether from the affairs of the commonwealth. Because his 
neighbors yielded themselves to every gust of passion, he must 
be passionless. Because the times were treacherous, he must 
punctilious^ cherish his personal honor. Because they were 
inhuman, he cultivated all the amenities of life. Because ca- 
lamity swept over the world, he was enamored of Epicurean 
ease. Heroism was the boast of not a few, and to their vu*- 
tues he paid the homage of an incredulous obeisance. Dog- 
matism was the habit of very many, and therefore Montaigne 
must surrender himself to an almost universal skepticism. 

The contrast was as captivating as it was complete. With 
a temper easily satisfied ; with affections as tranquil as they 
were kindly ; with a curiosity ever wakeful, but never impet- 
uous ; with competency, health, friends, books, and leisure, 
Montaigne had all the means of happiness which can be brought 
within the reach of those to whom life is not a self-denying ex- 
istence, but a pleasant pastime. Yet, with him, it was the 
pastime of an active, enlightened, and amiable mind. The 



521- POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

study of man as a member of society was his chosen pursuit, 
hut he conducted it in a mode altogether his own. The indi- 
vidual man, Michel Montaigne, such as he would he in every 
imaginable relation and office of society, was the subject of 
his daily investigation. He became, of all egotists, the most 
pleasant, versatile, and comprehensive. He produced complete 
sketches of himself with an air of the most unreserved frank- 
ness, and in a tone frequently passing from quiet seriousness 
to graceful badinage. He describes his tastes, his humors, 
his opinions, his frailties, his pursuits, and his associates, with 
the most exuberant fertility of invention, and has wrought out 
a general delineation of our common humanity from the pro- 
found knowledge of a single member of it ; and, as the variety 
is boundless, so is the unity well sustained. His essays are a 
mirror in which every reader sees his own image reflected, but 
in which he also sees the image of Montaigne reflecting it. 
There he is, ever changing, and yet ever the same. He looks 
on the world with a calm indifference, which would be repuls- 
ive were it not corrected by his benevolent curiosity about its 
history and its prospects. He has not one malignant feeling 
about him, except it be toward the tiresome, and especially to- 
ward such of them as provoke his yawns and his resentment 
by misplaced and by commonplace wisdom. He has a quick 
relish for pleasure, but with a preference for such pleasures as 
are social, inoffensive, and easily procured. He has a love for 
virtue, but chiefly, if not exclusively, when she exacts no 
great effort nor any considerable sacrifice. He loves his fel- 
low-men, but does not much or seriously esteem them. He 
loves study and meditation, but stipulates that they shall ex- 
pose him to no disagreeable fatigue. He cherishes every tem- 
per which makes life pass sociably and pleasantly. He takes 
things as he finds them in perfect good humor, makes the best 
of them all, and never burdens his mind with vhtuous indig- 
nation, unattainable hopes, or profitless regrets. In short, as 
exhibited in his own self-portraiture, he is an Epicurean who 
knows how to make his better dispositions tributary to his 
comfort, and also knows how to prevent his evil tempers from 
troubling his repose. 

The picture of himself, which Montaigne thus holds up to 
his readers as a representation of themselves, is not sublime, 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 525 

nor is it beautiful ; but it is a striking and a masterly like- 
ness. It is drawn with inimitable grace and freedom, and 
with the most transparent perspicuity ; and they who are best 
entitled to pronounce such a judgment, admire in his language 
a richness and a curious felicity unknown to any preceding 
French writers. Even they to whom his tongue is not native 
can perceive that his style is the easy, the luminous, and the 
flexible vehicle of his thoughts, and never degenerates into a 
mere apology for the want of thought ; and that his imagina- 
tion, without ever disfiguring his ideas, however abstract and 
however subtle they may be, habitually clothes them with the 
noblest forms and the most appropriate coloring. 

But my more immediate object is to notice the relation in 
which Montaigne stands to the other great moral teachers of 
his native land, and to those habits of thought by which France 
is, and has so long been characterized. The antagonist in every 
thing of the spirit of his times, he seems to have regarded with 
peculiar aversion the peremptory confidence by which the great 
controversy of his age was conducted, both by the adherents 
of Rome and by the founder of Calvinism. Because they would 
admit no doubt whatever, every form of doubt found har- 
bor with him. Because they were dogmatists, he must be a 
skeptic. 

In M. Faugere's recent edition of Paschal's Thoughts will 
be found the famous dialogue on the skepticism of Montaigne, 
between Paschal and De Sacy — a delineation so exquisite, that 
it seems mere folly to attempt any addition to it. The genius 
of Port Royal, however, exhibits there its severity not less than 
its justice ; and a few words may not be misplaced in the at- 
tempt to mitigate a little of the rigor of the condemnation. 
Montaigne was a skeptic (as very many are), because his sa- 
gacity and diligence were buoyant enough to raise his mind to 
the clouds which float over our heads, but were not buoyant 
enough to elevate him to the pure regions of light which lie 
beyond them. His learning was various rather than recondite. 
It was drawn chiefly from Latin authors, and from the Latin 
authors of a degenerating age ; not from Cicero or Virgil, but 
from Seneca and Pliny. Of Grreek he knew but little, though 
he was profoundly conversant with the translation of Plutarch, 
with which Amyot had lately rendered all French readers fa- 
miliar. From such masters Montaigne did not learn, and could 



526 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE, 

not have learned, the love of truth. They taught him rather 
to content himself with loose historical gossip, and with half- 
formed notions in philosophy. They taught him not how to 
resolve, but how to amuse himself with, the great problems of 
human existence. They encouraged his characteristic want 
of seriousness and earnestness of purpose. From such studies, 
and from the events of his life and times, he learned to flutter 
over the surface of things, and to traverse the whole world of 
moral, religious, and political inquiry, without finding, and 
without seeking, a resting-place. His aimless curiosity and 
versatile caprice form at once the fascination and the vice of 
his writings, though not, indeed, their only vice. In this pres- 
ence I am bound to add the warning, that the name of Mon- 
taigne belongs to that melancholy roll of the great French skep- 
tical writers — Rabelais, Montesquieu, Bayle, Voltaire, and Di- 
derot — who, not content to assault the principles of virtue, have 
so far debased themselves as laboriously to stimulate the dis- 
orderly appetites of their readers. 

Yet the skepticism of Montaigne was not altogether such as 
theirs is. He has none of their dissolute revelry in confound- 
ing the distinctions of truth and falsehood, of good and evil. 
He does not, like some of them, delight in the darkness with 
which he believes the mind of man to be hopelessly enveloped. 
He rather placidly and contentedly acquiesces in the convic- 
tion that truth is beyond his reach. He could amuse himself 
with doubt, and play with it. With few positive and no dear- 
ly-cherished opinions, he had no ardor for any opinion, and had 
not the slightest desire to make proselytes to his own Pyrrhon- 
ism. He was, on the contrary, to the last degree, tolerant of 
dissent from his own judgment ; and, in the lack of other op- 
ponents, was prompt, and even glad, to contradict himself. Of 
all human infirmities, dullness, and obscurity, and vehemence 
are those from which he was most exempt. Of all human pas- 
sions, the zeal which fires the bosom of a missionary is that 
from which he was the most remote. We associate with him 
as one of the most pleasant of all our illustrious companions, 
and quit him as one of the least impressive of all our eminent 
instructors. Into what new forms his skeptical and his social 
spirit passed in the age next succeeding his own, will be the 
subject of the lecture which I hope to address to you when we 
next meet. 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 527 



LECTURE XIX. 

ON THE POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

In my last lecture I observed how Rabelais (the earliest of 
the three dominant intellects of France in the sixteenth cen- 
tury) found endless matter for the broadest mirth in the mys- 
teries of our mortal existence ; how Calvin derived from Holy 
Writ the peremptory solution of them all ; and how Montaigne 
amused himself with the inquiry whether such questions were 
really susceptible of any answer whatever. To that inquiry, 
his friend, disciple, and imitator, Francis Charron, devoted his 
once celebrated Treatise on Wisdom. Montaigne had played 
with the problem "Que sais-je?" and had inscribed it as a 
motto on the scales he kept by him. Charron inscribed not 
only on his book, but on the portals of his house at Condom, the 
words " Je ne s^ai." The torch which had thus been passed 
from hand to hand was at length grasped by Rene des Cartes 
— a genius who, in profound, intense, and persevering thought 
surpassed Calvin himself, and rose above Rabelais and Mon- 
taigne m the expansion of his mind, still more than he fell be- 
low them in wit, and grace, and playfulness. 

Des Cartes (the son of a counselor in the Parliament of 
Rennes) was born at La Haye, in Touraine, in the year 1596. 
As a volunteer at the siege of La Rochelle, and afterward 
in the army commanded by Prince Maurice in Holland, he 
studied the passions of man as developed in their wildest ex- 
citement, and then traveled far and long to observe the man- 
ners and the prevalent opinions of the various nations of Eu- 
rope. In one of these journeys, finding himself (as he informs 
us) in a wild and sequestered scene on the frontiers of Bava- 
ria, he spent the whole day in a sunny nook, passing from 
thought to thought till he had at last conceived the desire of 
reducing his mind to a state of absolute nakedness, in which, 
divested of all his former ideas and affections, he might retain 
nothing except the will and the power to investigate truth. 



528 POWER OF THE PEN IN FR.NCE. 

This singular wish was as singularly accomplished. He began 
by inhabiting, in the midst of Paris, a hermitage so inaccessi- 
ble, that his friends could never discover it, until, after passing 
two years in that retirement, he became convinced that the 
Parisian air was possessed by a subtle poison, disposing him 
to vain and chimerical imaginations. From these intellectual 
miasmata he therefore escaped to the town of Egmont, in Hol- 
land, and resided there during the next twenty-five years in a 
state of unbroken meditation, solitude, and repose. The Uni- 
versity of Utrecht at length, by preferring against him the 
charge of atheism, drove him once more to Paris as a place of 
shelter. But at Paris, also, he sought security in vain, and 
was compelled to accept from Q^ueen Christina th» welcome 
which both his adopted and his native countries had refused 
him. He died shortly after his arrival in Sweden, a victim to 
that severe and ungenial climate. 

Of the fifty-four years which Des Cartes thus passed on 
earth, more than thirty were spent in a state of self-abnega- 
tion such as no anchorite has ever emulated. It was little 
that his sleep, and diet, and exercise were exactly regulated 
by the single purpose of securing, to the utmost possible ex- 
tent, the independence of his soul on his body. His mental ap- 
petites were subjugated to a still more rigid discipline. To 
secure to his reason an undisputed supremacy over all his 
other faculties, he labored not only to cast down every idol of 
the cavern, but to consign to oblivion all the interests, the sen- 
timents, and the events with which either his heart or his im- 
agination had ever been occupied. He even attempted to eman- 
cipate himself from the memory of those deceptive languages, 
G-reek and Latin, in which such subtle disguises have been 
found for so many mental illusions. That he might ascend to 
the sanctuary of truth, he thus aspired to become a pure ab- 
straction of defsecated intellect. 

The result of this sublime and persevering effort was to give 
birth to the Cartesian philosophy, which has so long exercised, 
and which even yet retains, so powerful an influence over the 
minds of the educated classes of society in France. The ex- 
planation of that celebrated system falls within the province of 
other teachers in the University. I shall attempt only to no- 
tice one or two of its elementary principles ; and I shall do so 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 529 

in tlie fewest possible words, because I am well aware that no 
words of mine, however multiplied, could render intelligible 
to my audience doctrines which I myself understand so very 
imperfectly. 

" Cogito, ergo sum," is the massive foundation-stone of the 
colossal edifice erected by Des Cartes. That famous proposi- 
tion, though really " the well-ripened fruit of long delay," may 
perhaps sound not only as a truism, but as of all truisms the 
most meagre. Such a judgment would, however, prove nothing 
except the ignorance and incompetency of the judge. 

"I think, therefore I exist," is not the fragment of a syllo- 
gism which might be reconstructed thus : "Whatever thinks, 
exists. But I think. Therefore I exist." It is rather an en- 
thymeme — that is, an immediate sequence of two propositions, 
of which the second is the necessary offspring of the first. " I 
think" — that is, I am conscious of the act of thinlcing. My- 
self and my thoughts are a plurality, not a unity. They are 
the objects of which / am the subject. My consciousness of 
them is my adjudication that such objects exist. Or suppose 
that I can doubt even the existence of my own thoughts. 
Well, even so ; that very doubt is itself a thought of which I 
am conscious. Let my skepticism be so absolute and so uni- 
versal as to involve in uncertainty every other conceivable po- 
sition, yet that very skepticism is the affirmation of myself as 
a thiaking being. 

Here, then, the naked reason has at length set her foot upon 
one resting-place, narrow if you will, but yet firm and im- 
movable. Here is one truth which can not be assailed even 
by doubt itself; or, rather, here is a truth which doubt itself 
does but verify and confirm. Nor is this a barren position. 
It is rather a ground which, when duly cultivated, is prolific 
of results of the highest moment to every thinking being. 

For, first, it ascertains the fact that, to each man, his own 
consciousness is the primary evidence and the ultimate test of 
truth. But each man is conscious of many ideas, and each 
man, who is accustomed to meditate on the subject, becomes 
aware that his ideas are separable into two classes, distin- 
guished from each other by the difference of the sources in 
which they originate. One class of our ideas Ave derive from 
the testimony of our senses, and from the reflections we make 

Ll 



530 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

on that testimony. All our ideas of this class, are more or less 
fallacious, because they all partake of the infirmities of our 
bodily organs, and of the weakness of our mental powers. The 
other class of our ideas do not originate with our senses, be- 
cause they do not correspond with any thing presented to our 
notice in the exterior world. They are, therefore, a part of 
our very existence, and are coeval with it ; not, indeed, act- 
ively, but potentially ; not as thoughts already developed, but 
as pregnant germs of thought, to be awakened from their 
slumber, and ripened into maturity in the progress of our lives. 
The first of these classes of ideas may be called Factitious, the 
second Innate. 

Now, among our ideas, there is one which challenges pecul- 
iar attention. It represents to us a Being self-existent, infin- 
ite, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, supremely holy, just, and 
true, and absolutely perfect. To the object of that idea we 
give the name of G-od. But in the world of sensible things, 
nothing exists corresponding with this idea, nor any thing from 
our meditations on which we could have derived it. Conse- 
quently it belongs, not to the class of our factitious, but to the 
class of our innate ideas. 

But if my idea of G-od be an innate idea, it must have been, 
potentially at least, and as yet an undeveloped germ, a part 
of my very original existence, and coeval with it. My exist- 
ence and my idea of G-od must, therefore, both have sprung 
from the same fontal source. What, then, is that source ? 

First. My existence and my coeval idea of G-od did not orig- 
inate with myself. If I really had the power and the will to 
call myself into being, which is of all powers the most emi- 
nent, I must also have had the inferior power and the will to 
clothe myself with all the perfections embraced in my innate 
idea of G-od. But I am invested with no approach to any one 
of those perfections. 

Secondly. My existence and my coeval idea of G-od did not 
originate with my progenitors ; for, if they really called me 
into being, they must also have called into existence my innate 
idea of God ; that is, they must have infused into me a type 
of perfection infinitely transcending any prototype residing in 
themselves. They must have produced an effect with which the 
producing cause was not in the slightest degree commensurate. 



POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 531 

Thirdly. My existence and my coeval idea of Grod did not 
originate in the concurrence of a plurality of causes ; for, on 
that supposition, plurality, which is imperfection, called into 
being my idea of the Divine Unity, which is perfection. 

It follows that the origin of my existence and of my idea of 
God must be a cause distinct from myself and from my pro- 
genitors — must be a cause possessing the attribute of unity — 
and must be a cause invested with all other qualities of self- 
existence, infinity, omniscience, and the like, which that idea 
embraces. But such qualities can exist only as the forms of 
some substance. That substance must be a living, conscious, 
personal Being ; and to that Being we assign the name of Deity. 

See, then, the naked reason setting her foot upon a second 
rock ; a resting-place, not contracted and narrow like the first, 
but sufficiently broad and stable to sustain the superincumbent 
weight of all divine and of all human knowledge. Man's con- 
sciousness of his own thoughts has demonstrated his own ex- 
istence. Man's consciousness of his own innate idea of G-od 
has demonstrated the existence of a Deity, in whom every at- 
tribute of wisdom, power, and goodness meet in absolute per- 
fection. 

Now, of those perfections, truth is one ; for the opposite of 
truth, that is, falsehood and error, are imperfect. If, then, he 
who is the source of my being and of my innate ideas be true, 
those ideas must themselves be true ; that is, there must exist 
some objective realities of which they are the types. As G-od 
is the cause of those ideas, so must He also be the substance 
of them. They are the marks of the great architect indelibly 
impressed upon his workmanship, man. 

Behold, then, the third conquest attained by the pure and 
naked reason. In the innate ideas of the human mind she has 
acquired a mirror which represents to her, with infallible ac- 
curacy, many of the otherwise inscrutable secrets of the mate- 
rial and immaterial universe. 

Advancing from this basis, Des Cartes next proceeds to in- 
quire into the relations between the Creator and his creation, 
between the body and the soul, between mind and matter. He 
teaches, if I mistake not (and I am deeply conscious of my lia- 
bility to mistake), that between things spiritual and things 
material there is really nothing in common ; that between the 



532 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

immortality of the one and the decays and dissolution of the 
other there is really no contradiction ; that as created things 
remove farther and farther from their source, they become 
more and more multiplied, diverse, and dissimilar ; but that 
the Divine Unity is the common basis of them all ; that sci- 
ence is but the path by which we return to that unity ; that 
it is a continually progressive generalization — the constant dis- 
covery of ne\v harmonies, and reconcilement of seeming dif- 
ferences, until at length the whole universe shall be revealed 
as under the rule of some few laws — and those laws as depend- 
ent on G-od — and Grod himself as the common centre of all, as 
one in every form and species of unity, the single fountain of 
universal life. 

To determine how that divine causation acts and what it is, 
and how far that which we call cause and effect has any anal- 
ogy with the creative power and its results, Des Cartes moves 
onward into a complete system of psychology, founded on and 
illustrated by other systems, ph5^siological and physical. I do 
not presume to follow his awful guidance, but, descending to 
a level more befitting both my capacity and my office, I would 
attempt briefly to consider, "What was the influence, in France, 
of the Cartesian philosophy, of which such were the first or 
elementary principles ? 

Two systems of thought, the most singularly contrasted with 
each other, presented themselves to Des Cartes as he looked 
back on the generations immediately preceding his own. The 
first was the Scholastic philosophy, which, enthralled both by 
premises and by conclusions which it was forbidden to all men 
to controvert, and by a logic from which it was forbidden to 
any to escape, performed within these impassable limits feats 
of mental agility almost as miraculous as they were useless. 
From this despotism of human authority, some of the great 
thinkers of Italy, of England, and of France had revolted into 
a skepticism which denied or depreciated the power of man to 
attain to truth at all, either by the use of his reason or by the 
aid of revelation. The Reformers themselves had contributed, 
however undesignedly, to foster this prevailing habit of mind, 
by subverting many of the established opinions, without being 
able to agree with each other as to the belief to be substituted 
for them. 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 533 

But the noble intellect, and yet more noble spirit of Des 
Cartes, rejected alike this bondage of human authority and the 
lawless anarchy by which it had been succeeded. Loving truth 
with his -whole soul, he sought her by the most rugged and un- 
trodden paths. He accepted, indeed, the doubts of Montaigne 
and Charron, of G-assendi and of Hobbes. But, in the judg- 
ment of his most eminent disciples, the unbelief, Mdiich with 
them was final, with him was provisional. To them it was a 
resting-place, to him a point of departure. He became a vol- 
untary unbeliever only that he might attain to a settled faith ; 
and divested himself of every preconceived thought, that so he 
might erect that superstructure of his more mature judgment 
on the single basis which appeared to him unassailable by any 
just or even plausible objection. When addressing you on the 
subject of the " provisional doubts" of Abelard, I offered my 
opinion on the substantial worth and accuracy of such eulo- 
gies as these ; and I now add, that the skepticism of Des Cartes, 
however upright, did not conduct him to the truth he sought. 
The system which he thus built up by the intense and solitary 
labors of more than twenty years, has long since been num- 
bered among the things that were, and are not. It was not 
given to him to be the intellectual legislator of succeeding ages. 
But he achieved the yet higher glory of transmitting to all the 
generations which have followed his own, the indelible impress 
of his freedom of thought, of his reverence for truth, and of 
his fervent zeal for the propagation of it. 

The earliest of the triumphs of Des Cartes are, however, 
rather amusing than serious, and are curiously characteristic 
of French society. The austere sage, or, rather, his books and 
his doctrines, became for a time eminently fashionable in Paris. 
Thus we find Madame de Sevigne persuading herself that the 
nieces of so great a man must excel all other ladies in a cer- 
tain dance, which, in those days, all ladies were performing. 
Her inimitable letters bear frequent testimony to the popular 
use of Cartesian phraseology, as when she writes to her daugh- 
ter, " J'aimerois fort a vous parler sur certains chapitres ; mais 
ce plaisir n'est pas a portee d'etre espere. En attendant, je 
pense, done je suis ; je pense a vous avec tendresse, done je 
vous aime ; je pense a vous uniquement de cette maniere, done 
je vous aime uniquement," The fables of La Fontaine also 



534 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

illustrate the prevailing admiration, or, it might rather he said, 
the suhmissive worship, of the great teacher, whom he declares 
the Pagans would have adored as a god, and to whom (he adds) 
even we may assign a place midway between those beings who 
are merely human and those who are wholly spiritual. Fene- 
lon reproduced the principles of Des Cartes with all the em- 
bellishments of his own graceful imagination ; and Bossuet 
himself, in his treatise, " De la Connaissance de Dieu et de 
Soi-meme," is supposed to be nothing more than the inter- 
preter of some of the more considerable tenets of the Cartesian 
philosophy. 

To explain the decrees of a power so capricious and arbitrary 
as fashion, is a task which may be undertaken by none but 
those who have been initiated into her higher mysteries. It 
may, however, be conjectured, that the patrons of that kind 
of celebrity found a peculiar zest in bestowing it on one who 
stood so far aloof from their own glittering circle. Probably, 
also, they discovered in his style a charm which the most en- 
thusiastic might feel, however little they might be able to 
analyze it ; for the language of Des Cartes resembles nothing 
more than the atmosphere, by the intervention of which we 
see, though it is itself invisible. It is the nearest possible ap- 
proach to that inarticulate speech in which disembodied spirits 
may be supposed to interchange their thoughts. It has no 
technical terms — no appeals to the memory — no coloring of 
imagination or of wit — no trope, or epigram, or antithesis — 
no rhetoric and no passion. And yet it wants neither warmth 
nor elegance. The warmth is perceptible in his evident and 
devout solicitude to attain to truth and to impart it. He 
writes, not to exhibit his own powers, but to benefit his read- 
ers. In the words (I believe) of Pascal, " As you study the 
author, you perceive the man," The elegance consists in the 
felicity and the ease with which each successive word, and 
sentence, and paragraph, and discussion falls into its proper 
place, and exactly fulfills its appropriate office. It is a lan- 
guage which may be compared to a perfect system of musical 
chords, which, being touched by some absolute master of the 
science of harmony, yields a strain at once the most complex 
in reality and the most simple in appearance. La Place him- 
self never writes under the restraint of a more severe logic. 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 535 

La Fontaine never tells a fable with a more perspicuous sim- 
plicity. " Les Precieuses Ridicules" of Moliere, therefore, read 
and extolled Des Cartes in the sincere belief that they under- 
stood him. It was the most natural, though .the most com- 
plete of all mistakes. If our own Butler could have borrowed 
his pen, the superficial many would have been as much fasci- 
nated by the Analogy as they were by the " Discours de la 
Methode," and (with all reverence be it added) the penetra- 
ting few would have better understood, as they would have 
still more profoundly revered, that imperishable monument of 
piety and of wisdom. 

But to gratify the taste, and to win the applause of the 
courtly or literary circles of the age of Louis XIV., was the 
least of the effects of the labors of Des Cartes. He is the 
founder in France of that habit of mind, which to this hour 
characterizes her more eminent philosophers, and which they 
hold up to the admiration of mankind under the distinguished 
term of Spiritualism. On the soundness of these Neo-Platonic 
doctrines I do not presume to hazard an opinion. But it is 
risking little to say that he did good service to his country who, 
by the undying authority of his name, has rescued it from the 
sensualism of Hobbes. To Des Cartes, more than to any other 
man, it is owing that Physiology has never been allowed by 
the great philosophical teachers of France, or by their disciples, 
to usurp the province of Psychology ; that the soul is not be- 
lieved by them to acquire and to digest her aliment just as the 
body gathers and assimilates its food ; that they do not sup- 
pose the will, and all the other powers of the interior man, to 
be but so many parts of a thinking mechanism, obeying the 
immutable laws of mental dynamics, and destined at last to 
an inert inactivity ; that they discern in the relations of man 
to his Creator the still perceptible traces of the Divine image, 
in which our race was formed, and which, in the depths of its 
fall and degradation, it still retains ; and that they perceive, 
even in the economy and structure of the material universe, a 
wisdom which contemplates and provides for something more 
than merely material advantages. 

Des Cartes is also the founder, among his fellow-country- 
men, of "Rationalism," if that word be used in its inoffensive 
and bettei- sense. Shortly before his birth, the rebound of the 



536 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE, 

human mind from the fetters which had so long repressed its 
elasticity had been signalized by the appearance, in every part 
of Europe, of spirits struggling for freedom, and aspiring, as 
it has been beautifully said, to inhabit the palace of their own 
thoughts — the edita, doctrina sapientum, templa serena. But 
as yet these were but the aspirations of the nobler few. The 
less noble many were still bowing beneath their ancient servi- 
tude. It was in the boyhood of Des Cartes that Bruno was 
burned at Rome, and Yanini tortured at Toulouse. It was in 
the ripe manhood of Des Cartes that the reluctant Gralileo was 
compelled to admit the revolution of the sun round the earth. 
It was soon after Des Cartes had quitted the world that Male- 
branche was still benaoaning the despotism which demanded 
of all men the sacrifice of their reason and their conscience to 
the Peripatetic faith. Yet in Malebranche, Des Cartes found 
his most eminent disciple, and in Leibnitz his most illustrious 
follower. To this hour the Cartesian spirit is dominant in 
Germany, and the " Cotigo, ergo sum," is the real basis of the 
hazardous speculations of her greatest philosophers. 

For that spirit yet lives, though the forms to which it once 
gave life are forever gone. It lives in those mental habits, so 
familiar to our own times, that we have almost forgotten that 
they are new, and have ceased to look back to their origin 
among us. Such is the habitual assertion of the right to dis- 
criminate between truth and falsehood, in opposition to any and 
to every human authority. Such is also the habit of bringing 
aU such questions to the test of the universal, not of individ- 
ual reason. Such, again, is the rejection, in our speculative 
inquiries, of the treacherous aid of a philosophical terminolo- 
gy, and the rejection of the yet more dangerous support of 
great names, of ancient traditions, and of established maxims. 
And such, above all the rest, is the habit of regarding the search 
for truth, and the propagation of truth, as the high duties to 
which the intellectual rulers of mankind are bound, when nec- 
essary, to sacrifice, not their ease merely, but fame itself, and 
every other recompense which the world could ofier, Francis 
Bacon was not more the founder of such rationalism as this in 
England, than Eene des Cartes was the founder of it in France. 

Nor was he content to vindicate the rights of reason. He 
labored, also, to determine and enforce her obligations. In 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 537 

Des Cartes, tlie characteristic logic of the French understand- 
ing attained its perfection, as, in his writings, it found its mod- 
el. A teacher of dialectics might draw from every page of the 
" Discours de la Methode" admii-able examples of the right use 
of that science. So admirable, indeed, were they, that, while 
Arnauld and Nicole followed their guidance in the " Grram- 
maire generale Raisonnee" and in the " Logique" of Port Roy- 
al, the dramatists, and wits, and poets, as they labored in the 
adjacent chateau of Yersailles to amuse their royal patron, ren- 
dered an involuntary homage to their literary sovereign. They 
imitated the severe sequence of his argumentation even when 
it was their immediate object to provoke a smile, and they 
auned at his transcendental truths while giving utterance to 
the anguish or the raptures of the heart. 

The French critics, pledged as they are to discover the ab- 
solute perfection of dramatic genius in Corneille, Racine, and 
Moliere, the consummation of wit and taste in Boileau, and 
the last refinement of graceful playfulness in La Fontaine, 
maintain that the secret of the unrivaled beauty of them all 
consists in the sagacity with which they grasp universal truths, 
and in the precision with which they express them, or, in oth- 
er words, in the Cartesian spirit by which they are animated. 
I know not how to concur in this eulogy. I can perceive, in- 
deed, in the poetry of the age of Louis XIV., this boasted pow- 
er of reasoning ; but I thinlt that I also perceive that it is at- 
tained at the expense of the higher power of thinking. "We 
have learned, from our own poets and dramatists, to regard a 
yet more exalted office than this as their appropriate ministry. 
"We require them to invent and to imagine — to detect the mys- 
teries of the heart — to kindle and to control the affections, and 
to render the beautiful and the sublime, the pathetic and the 
ludicrous, suggestive of truth sometimes familiar and some- 
times recondite. The Cartesian philosophy and the logical 
exactness of their French rivals is like a cold subsoil, stunt- 
ing and starving the vegetation of the well-cultured surface. 
Thus their heroines not seldom pause to deliver a subtle anal- 
ysis of the passions by which we are to suppose them devoured. 
Thus, also, the most brilliant of their comic personages give 
utterance to long epigrammatic lectures, in the tone (not, I 
fear, of all tones the most captivating) which best befits an ac- 



538 POWER OF THE PEN IN FP.,ANCE. 

ademioal prEelection. The French dramatis persona is not an 
individual agent, behaving and talking as his own peculiar na- 
ture prompts him. He is but one of the various aspects of the 
dramatic author himself — one of the many vehicles for his emo- 
tions, for his Vv^isdom, or for his wit. "When we read Henry 
IV., we think only of FalstafF; when we read Andromache, 
we think only of Racine. Hence it is that neither in the fa- 
miliar conversation of the French people, nor in their popular 
literature, do we often meet with the reference (so incessant 
among ourselves) to the fictitious characters of the national 
stage, as though they were so many veritable men and wom- 
en, the intimate acquaintance of us all. For not only the 
kings and sages, but the lackeys and chambermaids of the 
classical French theatre are all graduates of the Cartesian 
academy — reasoners from whom, indeed, you learn no falla- 
cies, but associates from whom you catch no inspiration. Our 
own national and invincible predilections will constrain us all 
to look with infinitely greater pleasure upon the forest glade, 
over which the oak freely tosses his giant arms into the air, 
than upon all the gardens ever laid out by Le Notre, and on 
all the rectilineal avenues with which he has adorned them. 

But Des Cartes had yet other pupils than these, whose gen- 
ius shed a glory around the age, though not around the court, 
of Louis XIV. In his correspondence is to be seen a letter 
from M. Marsenne, dated November, 1639, referring to a youth 
of sixteen years of age who had just finished a treatise on the 
conic sections, and who promised to rival the most illustrious 
mathematicians. The intelligence seems scarcely to have at- 
tracted the notice of the great philosopher, who, however, aft- 
er an interval of eight years, met this precocious genius, and 
conversed with him on the existence of a vacuum, on the weight 
of the atmosphere, and on the reality of that subtle matter 
which was then imagined to fill the illimitable regions of space. 
At the time of this interview, Blaise Pascal, for that was the 
young man's name, was laboring under an access of the mal- 
ady which accompanied him from the cradle to the grave, and 
Des Cartes (an amateur physician) was among the number 
of those who in vain suggested remedies for his relief. Fee- 
ble as was the bodily frame of Pascal, the few years which he 
passed in intercourse with the world were vehemently agitated 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. l39 

by some of the most intense of the worldly passions. TI13 
years which intervened between his retirement to Port Royal 
des Champs and his death were devoted to a preparation for 
that great change — a preparation which consisted in the de- 
vout communing of his soul with God, and in preparing, for 
the benefit of mankind, that great work, of which the scat- 
tered fragments, under the name of Pascal's Thoughts, are in 
the hearts of many and in the hands of all. 

And yet not more than seven years have elapsed since the 
world was first placed in possession of a genuine collection of 
them. The earliest edition had been rendered at once imper- 
fect by the omissions, and redundant by the additions, to which 
the author's manuscripts had been subjected by the jealous pi- 
ety of his surviving associates at Port Royal. The existence 
of some such errors was generally known, but the extent of 
them was unsuspected, until M. Cousin surprised the world by 
the publication of many of the suppressed passages, in which 
Pascal appeared to avow a Pyrrhonism still more complete than 
that which he had himself condemned in Montaigne. To ver- 
ify or to correct this discovery, M. Faugere entered upon a dil- 
igent examination of every document throwing any light on it, 
which could be found in the national or in the private archives 
of France. The result of this labor of love was the appearance 
of a new edition of the " Pensees," to which it seems scarcely 
possible that any thing material should be added by any future 
inquirer. A careful collection and collocation of the scattered 
leaves of the original manuscripts has enabled M. Faugere to 
show that the passages which had attracted M. Cousin's notice 
were, in reality, fragments of which the sense had been entire- 
ly changed by their accidental separation from their context or 
from each other. In what manner this has been proved — what 
new views M. Faugere has been able to disclose of Pascal's 
character and doctrines, and what that character and what 
those doctrines really were, may be best learned from one of 
that series of Essays which, having been first given to the 
world anonymously, have recently been collected and pub- 
lished as his own by Mr. Rogers, one of the very few A^Titers 
of our age and country who could, without presumption, have 
undertaken to fathom the learning and to appreciate the gen- 
ius of Blaise Pascal. It is a presumption of which I shall not 



540 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE, 

myself "be guilty. It will he my humbler office to inquire, 
What is the place occupied by that great man in the literary 
history of his native land ? 

Pascal, then, was a Cartesian. Like Des Cartes, he began 
with doubt, in order that he might end in certainty. Like 
him, he renounced all allegiance to merely human authorities, 
however exalted and however venerable. In the spirit of his 
master, he received what was passing in the microcosm of his 
own mind as being, at least to himself, the primary and indis- 
pensable witness of truth. As a true disciple of that severe 
school, he not only revered his own reason as the supreme 
earthly judge of every question so brought under his cogni- 
zance, but conducted all such investigations by the aid of the 
same geometrical logic by which Des Cartes himself had been 
guided. And, to complete the resemblance between these two 
great masters of the art and power of investigation, each of 
them abandoned his privilege of free inquiry so soon as he en- 
tered within the sacred precincts of Faith, where he received, 
or professed to receive, the authentic intimations of the Divine 
will in the spirit of a little child. 

But here the similitude ended and the divergence began. 
Des Cartes impersonated the " pure reason" sojourning among 
men, to occupy herself, not with the business of their lives, but 
with the mysteries of their nature. Pascal impersonated hu- 
man sympathy, yearning over the world from which he had 
withdrawn, and still responding to all the sorrows by which it 
was agitated. Lofty as was the range of his thoughts, they 
were never averted from that great human family to which he 
belonged. Every afflicted member of it had in him a fellow- 
sufferer. Driven into solitude by the anguish of disappointed 
hopes and blighted affections, he carried thither also the bur- 
den of a body oppressed by almost ceaseless pain or lassitude. 
And there, living continually, as Richard Baxter says of him- 
self, on the confines of the church-yard, Pascal learned, like 
that holy man, to regard physical science but as at best a man- 
ly sport, and metaphysical science as nothing more than a cap- 
tivating amusement. To learn that even these studies were 
also vanity, was, however, the most exquisitely painful of all 
the lessons he had as yet been taught. It delivered him over 
to the crushing burden of an existence, cheered by no pursuit. 



POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 541 

and animated by no interest. Most solemn and pathetic are 
the words with which he celebrated his deliverance from that 
fearful void. They were inscribed on a sort of amulet, which, 
from that time forward to the last hour of his life, he never 
ceased to carry secretly on his person. " Pere juste (he there 
exclaims), le monde te n' a point connu, mais je t'a connu. 
Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie. Je m'en suis separe ! Renon- 
ciation totale et douce." He had thus found at last the relief 
of his own sorrows, but it was in renouncing his attachments 
to the world that he might devote his mighty powers to the 
consolation of others. 

Such was the spirit in which Pascal entered on the composi- 
tion of his immortal " Pensees." Of those reflections, man 
was the subject ; and even, in the absence of any positive test- 
imony, the internal evidence might satisfy any reader of them 
that the three men whom he most profoundly studied were Mi- 
chel Montaigne, Kene des Cartes, and Blaise Pascal. "Who but 
the great essayist is the original of his vivid portrait of one 
made up of vanity and self-contradiction — so light and frivo- 
lous as to be amused with the veriest trifles, even while he is 
the victim of misery, weakness, and insignificance — at once so 
little and so great — possessed with an insatiable desire for hap- 
piness beyond his reach, and thirsting for truth to which he is 
unable to attain? Who but the great philosopher was the 
prototype of the exalted being he depicts, as evidently formed 
for infinity — as immense when contrasted with nothingness — 
as the great prodigy of nature — as gifted with powers to know 
and to desire what is good — as great, because he is able to 
know his own wretchedness — as nobler than the whole mate- 
rial universe, even if it were all united together to overwhelm 
him, because it would be unconscious of its victory, and he 
conscious of his own destruction ? And who but Pascal himself 
was that union of two — the composite man — the chimera — the 
chaos — the inconsistent and incomprehensible monster, whom 
his own energetic hand has so powerfully sketched ? 

It was from his introspection of that composite man that 
Pascal, like Des Cartes, derived some elementary truths to 
serve as the basis of a philosophy yet more divine than his. 
On the basis of his own consciousness he planted the lowest 
steps of the ladder on which, like that of the Hebrew patriarch, 



542 POWEIJ OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

an ascent might, as he hoped, be at last made to the very gates 
of heaven. From those innate and unassailable ideas he de- 
signed to evolve a series of consequences on which the mighty 
edifice of revealed truth might securely rest. He proposed to 
demonstrate the evangelical system by the Cartesian method. 
He undertook to establish the religion of prophecy and of mir- 
acle by the most severe logical induction. He summoned rea- 
son to lead the way to those elevated regions of thought, in 
which she must resign her charge to the guidance of faith and 
adoration. From a review of the relations and analogies be- 
tween the nature of man and the revelation of Clod, was to be 
wrought out a chain of internal evidences, linking indissolu- 
bly together those primary verities which our consciousness 
attests, and those ultimate verities which Christianity dis- 
closes. 

In these later times the Church has sustained no greater dis- 
appointment than in that premature death which intercepted 
the completion of Pascal's undertaking. The fragments of it 
lie scattered before us, and no meaner hand than his may pre- 
sume to reconstruct and finish them. Yet, even in their un- 
finished state, they constitute the most effectual, perhaps, of 
all the succors by which uninspired man has relieved the hu- 
man mind from the heavy burden of religious skepticism. 

And yet it is but too evident that the great teacher himself 
fainted occasionally beneath that burden throughout the whole 
of his mortal existence. M. Cousin's discoveries have, indeed, 
been superseded by the yet more recent discoveries of M. Fau- 
gere. But enough remains to show that Pascal paid the usual 
penalties of genius, and that not even he could ascend heights 
of such surpassing elevation, without perceiving that mists and 
obscurity hung over some parts of the boundless prospects 
which his mental vision commanded. And hence not, perhaps, 
the least attractive charm of his profound meditations. What 
more pathetic than the sadness with which he gazes on the 
impassable limits of his inquiries, and on the seeming contra- 
dictions to which they have conducted him ? What more sub- 
lime than the resolute integrity with which he scrutinizes and 
rejects the proffered aid of sophisms to enlarge and reconcile 
liis views? What more touching than the meekness with 
which his fatigued and anxious spirit finds, in the assurances 



POWER OF THE PEN IN PEANCE. 543 

of faitli, the repose which he has sought in vain from the most 
intense and persevering efforts of reason ? 

Much, however, of the painful unrest which preyed upon the 
mind of the author of the "Pensees" may, I believe, be ascribed 
to the necessity under which he lay of embracing the whole 
of the tenets of1;hat branch of the Universal Church to which 
he belonged. The superincumbent mass of her doctrines was 
continually tending to displace the foundations of his belief, 
deep and solid as they were. Even the intellect of Pascal was 
oppressed in the attempt to connect his innate ideas — those 
elementary evidences of truth which he drew from his own 
self-consciousness — with such dogmas as those of human merit 
— of the worship of saints — of ecclesiastical infallibility — and 
of the transubstantiation of the elements. Yet, until that con- 
nection had been so firmly established, his heart might not find, 
in the communion of papal Rome, the tranquillity and the sol- 
ace of which it stood in need ; and he never sought it in any 
other Christian fellowship than theirs. 

Sometimes, indeed, he found relief from skeptical thoughts 
by diverting his mind to topics of a less overwhelming interest. 
Some years before his retirement, the Jesuits had accused him 
of a disingenuous plagiarism from the Italians, on the subject 
of the weight of the atmosphere ; and it is said that his father 
repelled the imputation by the prophetical menace that a day 
would come when the youth whom they had injured would 
inflict on themselves an eternal shame and penitence. The 
utterance of this prediction is, however, doubtful ; but we know 
from the authority of his sister, Madame Perrier, that he un- 
dertook the Provincial Letters at the request of Arnauld, who 
had not himself succeeded in successfully refuting the condem- 
nation which, at the instance of the Jesuits, had been launched 
against him by the Sorbonne. And keen, indeed, were the 
shafts of the champion of Port Royal, and irremediable their 
wounds. Although, at the present day, few perhaps, if any, 
feel an interest in the controversy on its own account ; yet I 
can not but avow my own opinion that, in that controversy, 
much less than justice is rendered by Pascal to his antagonists. 
Father Daniel, one of the most learned of them, has written 
an answer which no one, I think, can read without conceiving 
some distrust of the accuracy of the great censor, both as a 



544 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

logician and as a narrator of matters of fact. But both. Daniel 
and Pascal leave unnoticed what I apprehend to be the true 
answer to a large part of the argument, or rather of the invec- 
tive, of the Provincial Letters. It is, that whoever will under- 
take to prescribe a system of morals in which every principle 
of virtue shall be brought to the test of extreme cases, and 
shall be accommodated to them, will ere long find himself in a 
region of hypothesis, in which darkness must be often put for 
light, and light for darkness. But thus to control and guide 
the conscience by peremptory rules, embracing every conceiv- 
able problem of human conduct, was not peculiar to the Jesu- 
its. Such casuistry was part of the religious system of the 
Jansenists also ; and, indeed, of every other section of the 
Church of Rome. It formed the code to be administered in 
the judgment seat of the confessional. Pascal and Daniel 
might each have silenced the other by the remark, or by the 
acknowledgment, that their common spiritual mother was re- 
ally responsible for the extravagances of Escobar and Sanchez, 
because she required all her children to live under the law of 
virtue considered as an abstract science, rather than under the 
law of virtue considered as a sentiment spontaneously arising 
in the regenerate heart. 

But the reader of the Provincial Letters can hardly pause to 
form any such cold censure. It seems to him impossible that 
a weapon of such exquisite edge and temper should be wielded 
by any other arm than that of truth herself. He can not be- 
lieve that a fiction so simple, and yet so admirably adapted to 
its purpose, as the imaginary dialogue of the first ten letters, 
should be really affording concealment to any error. He re- 
jects as incredible the supposition that any darkness (conscious 
or unconscious) should really be overclouding a mind which 
can infuse a light so pellucid into that metaphysical chaos, 
and can animate with so much light and warmth the dry bones 
of so obscure a controversy. And while Pascal exercises this 
kind of spell over the understanding of his readers, he holds 
their imagination also in equal bondage. His first ten letters 
are a kind of comedy, glowing with all the illusions, the irony, 
the gayety, and the wit of the French theatre in the age of 
Louis XIV. Then, however, the scene is shifted. The well- 
meaning but bewildered interpreter of the Jesuitical casuists 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 545 

and his Socratic interrogator are dismissed from the stage, and 
the Port Royalist .appears in his own person to pronounce an 
indignant invective on the extravagant and atrocious opinions 
into which his too candid interlocutor has heen beguiled. It 
is an invective as withering as ever proceeded from the French 
palpit, when ringing with the vehement eloquence of Bossuet, 
or the inexorable logic of Bourdaloue. 

I have said that I aim at nothing more than to ascertain 
the place properly belonging to Pascal in the literary history 
of his native land. It is a position unlike that of any of his 
illustrious competitors. "With each of them literature was the 
great business and object of life. With Pascal it may be said 
to have been rather at one time a recreation, at another a self- 
sacrifice — a recreation or a self-sacrifice of an intellectual giant. 
Pie played with physical and mathematical science, and aban- 
doned it as a pastime unworthy the heir of an immortal exist- 
ence. He played with theological controversy, and turned 
aside from it also as a pursuit below the dignity of his sacred 
vocation. He did not play, indeed, with the task of demon- 
strating the truths of Christianity, but he undertook it in a 
spirit of compassionate sympathy for his brethren of mankind, 
with which no desire for their applause, nor any other secular 
motive, was allowed to mingle. Into these relaxations, and 
into these tasks, the whole soul of the author was unreservedly 
thrown ; and in each of them in turn he exhibits some new 
aspect of that sublime and comprehensive spirit. Except from 
these genuine and undesigned self-disclosures, it would have 
been scarcely credible that in the same mind could have met 
in perfect harmony the reasoning powers of a great mathema- 
tician and the imagination of a great poet; the genial warm- 
.heartedness of a philanthropist and the malicious wit of a 
comedian ; the condense^ energy of an orator and the profound 
and conscientious deiiberations of a philosopher; or that the 
canvas on which he wrought out these prodigies of genius 
should be ever glowing with the well-ordered contrasts, the 
graceful variety, and the rich coloring of a painter of human 
life and manners. 

Pascal, however, in common with all his illustrious contem- 
poraries, was deficient in one of the moral sciences. I refer 
to that science Avhich investigates the principles of all social 

M M 



546 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

institutions, the causes and tendencies of historical events, 
and the rights and duties of man as a member of the common- 
wealth. While every other field of knowledge was cultivated 
in France, Political Philosophy alone was neglected. In other 
lands, by the aid of such studies, the mental had triumphed 
over the physical power ; hut there mind, though victorious in 
every other enterprise, was powerless to secure to society the 
blessings of a wise, just, and impartial government. "What 
were the real causes of this ill success ? or, in other words, to 
revert to the problem with a view to which I have engaged in 
this slight and hasty retrospect of French literature, What was 
its effect on the constitution of the civil government of France ? 
The answer to that question must at least touch on the polit- 
ical influence of the School of the Pyrrhonists, or the success- 
ors of Abelard — of the School of the Ideologists, or the success- 
ors of Bernard — and of the School of the Ergoists, or the suc- 
cessors of Calvin. The means by which the kings of France 
first compelled the great authors of their country to abandon 
their high office of explaining and improving the polity of the 
state, and then reduced them to the degraded rank of syco- 
phants or idolators of the royal power, are the fit subject of a 
distinct consideration. 

First, then, the Pyrrhonio School, or succession of the men 
of letters of France, may be deduced from Abelard as its pa- 
triarch, through Rabelais, Montaigne, Des Cartes, and Paschal, 
and many intervening but more obscure writers, till it reaches 
Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the other contributors to the 
Encyclopedic of the eighteenth century. It was the common 
design of them all, thougla that design was not avowed by 
them all with equal frankness., to embark on the voyage for 
the discovery of truth from " provisional doubt" as their com- 
mon point of departure ; that is, from a total absence of all 
positive opinions whatever. I stated on a former occasion why 
I believe every such attempt to proceed on a misconception of 
the fundamental laws of our moral nature, and of the immu- 
table condition of human life. I am well convinced, despite 
the examples of Abelard, of Des Cartes, and of Pascal, that 
he who, rebelling against those laws, and impatient of that 
condition, shall really commence his search for truth in a state 
of provisional doubt about all things, will end in a state of in- 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 547 

curable douLt upon every question. Whoever forces his mind 
into the habit of collecting from every quarter, and of present- 
ing vividly to his imagination, all the difficulties to v^hioh ev- 
ery doctrine, religious, moral, or political, is more or less ob- 
noxious, and who then makes such difficulties the subjects of 
liis protracted study, is inevitably, though unconsciously, dis- 
qualifying himself for the clear discernment, or for the cordial 
acceptance of any doctrines whatever. Progressively abandon- 
ing his faith in every thing else, he at length abandons all faith 
in himself, and acquiesces in the melancholy hypothesis that 
the primaeval cause of his existence (whatever that unknown 
cause may be) called him into being (if indeed his existence 
be real) with this eager craving for knowledge, that it might 
conduct him, not to light, but to darkness ; not to the discov- 
ery of the order and. symmetry of all things, but to a view of 
all things warring with each other in wild and chaotic confu- 
sion. Commencing with universal doubt, he will end with 
universal skepticism. 

By skepticism, as I at present employ that word, I do not 
mean the suspension of the judgment on each successive sub- 
ject of inquiry, nor that freedom of mind which, in the result 
of any such inquiry, can lay aside the most cherished precon- 
ceptions, and embrace Truth, even if she at length presents 
herself in a form the most unexpected and unwelcome. With- 
out such skepticism as this, the search for truth is but a mock- 
ery ; and the inquirer, however much he may vaunt his free- 
dom, is in fact a bondsman. The skepticism which I impute 
to so many of the great French writers is a very diiferent state 
of mind from this. They were opinionless, and were content 
to be so. They were destitute of settled convictions, and ac- 
quiesced in the want of them. Even so far as they could at- 
tain to any definite creed, they held by it faintly and irreso- 
lutely. They had no faith which they were ready to attest by 
any considerable sacrifice ; none to which they clung as an in- 
destructible part of their portion in this life, or of their inherit- 
ance beyond the grave. 

If, as I am constrained to infer, Abelard, and Rabelais, and 
Montaigne, and Bayle, and so many others of their illustrious 
lineage in France, were in this sense of the word skeptics, it 
seems to me to follow inevitably that a large part of their read- 



548 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

ers were skeptics also ; for they became illustrious precisely 
because they were the faithful interpreters of the thoughts and 
feelino-s which had already been born, or were struggling into 
life in the minds of their contemporaries. Their popular ac- 
ceptance and their fame were earned by that fidelity. They 
would have inculcated Pyrrhonism in vain, and would have 
been unrewarded by the laurel in any land of which the pre- 
vailing tendencies were not already Pyrrhonic. They gave to 
those tendencies a strength and a decision which would have 
been unattainable without their aid ; but, though they foster- 
ed, they did not create them. 

That skepticism has long been among the natural charac- 
teristios of Frenchmen, I infer, not merely from the general 
tone of so much of their literature, but also from that peculi- 
arity of it which Erench critics make their boast. It bears, 
as they very truly say, constant witness to the national pas- 
sion for abstract ideas. That passion, indeed, animates, not 
their books only, but their discourses in the senate, in the pul- 
pit, and at the bar. It takes possession of their clubs, and even 
of their private society. No aspirant after wit or wisdom in 
France oanmake good his pretensions, unless he knows how 
to scale the transcendental peaks of philosophy. To this spe- 
cies of the sublime they are ever ready to sacrifice even the 
beautiful. The fine mental sense of G-reeoe (where the love 
of beauty was a national and universal instinct) would have 
rejected, with unutterable scorn, those supersensuous embel- 
lishments with which Frenchmen, especially in our own times, 
rejoice to adorn their poetry, their history, and their rhet- 
oric ; for, in truth, such ornaments are as cheap and vulgar 
as they are unbecoming. Any man of common intelligence 
may be easily trained to any legerdemain of the understanding 
. — ^to the making of abstractions, for example, as easily as to 
the making of jokes or the making of verses. The production 
of apophthegms is a hard task to him, and to him only, who 
allows himself to utter no words without both a definite mean- 
ing and a profound conviction of the truth of what he says. 
The throes and labors of a long life preceded the birth of each 
of the sayings for which as many of the sages of G-reece have 
been immortalized. But the writer of the newspaper which 
lies on your breakfast table at Paris is never without his pearls 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 549 

of superlative wisdom to scatter over his account of yester- 
day's review or opera. 

Whence, then, is this national habit of quitting the solid 
earth for the hazy clouds ? It is nothing else than the love of 
that "provisional doubt" in which these aeronauts find their 
pleasure and their glory. By the aid of these metaphysical 
juggleries of words, they sublimate, darken, and dissolve all 
doctrines, even without the express and formal contradiction 
of any. They live in a region of half meanings or of no mean- 
ing — in a state of contented, though perhaps unconscious skep- 
ticism. Wedded to no political opinions, but dallying with 
all, they pass, in a few brief years, through all the phases in 
which political society has ever exhibited itself among men, 
though never lacking "pure ideas" with which to polish pe- 
riods and to darken counsel about each. 

The France of the last sixty years has indeed been in a state 
of chronic and unnatural distortion. But her intellectual hab- 
its were not, and could not have been, essentially different 
when the hill and gardens of Ste. G-enevieve were thronged 
with the disciples of Abelard, or when the booksellers' shops 
were besieged by purchasers of the Grargantua, or when the 
ladies of Versailles were writing Cartesian letters. The en- 
thusiastic popularity of their skeptical teachers has, from age 
to age, been at once the effect and the cause of that state of 
the national mind, of which we may read the results in every 
page of their national history. That history every where de- 
picts a people gallant, gay, ingenious, versatile, and ardent, be- 
yond all rivalry and all example. But it also sets before us a 
race more destitute than any other of profound and immutable 
convictions, and, therefore, less capable than any other of a 
steady progress in the great practical science of constitutional 
government — a people who are at one time the sport of any 
demagogue who can veil his selfish ambition under the cant 
of "pure ideas," and at another time the victims of any des- 
pot wdio may be strong enough to trample both the Ideologists 
and their verbal science under his feet. To have induced or 
cherished this mental temperament is, I believe, the well- 
founded reproach of the " Pyrrhonic succession" in France. 

The lessons of those who succeeded to, and represented in 
later times than his own, the mystic Bernard, however oppo- 



550 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

site to these in their character, were not very dissimilar in their 
results. I pause at the entrance into a chapter of ecclesias- 
tical history, upon which I am, for many reasons, at once re- 
luctant and incompetent to enter. It belongs not to me, hut 
to others among vis, to explain what were the religious and 
philosophical tenets of the G-allican Church, as represented by 
the Sorbonne, and by the schools of the various religious or- 
ders. I believe, however, that many of the most powerful 
members of those bodies, from the days of Bernard to those of 
Q,uesnel, adopted each of the two cardinal articles of the pe- 
culiar creed of the Abbot of Clairvaux : the first, the spiritual 
discernment, by the regenerate soul, of the mystic characters 
engraven on it by the very hand of the Creator, in attestation 
of the whole system of Roman Catholic doctrine ; the second, 
that, to the pure in heart, all Divine truth is attainable by 
means of that beatific vision, to which, even in this life, they 
are admitted — or, in other words, his "Philosophy of Love." 
To draw up an exact series of the French divines who, by their 
writings, inculcated on the people of France opinions substan- 
tially identical with these, would demand a kind and a degree 
of knowledge to which I have no pretension. But that such 
opinions are at this moment maintained in that country by the 
Hagiologists, who are laboring there so zealously for the ad- 
vancement of the interests of the See of Rome, is a fact fa- 
miliar to all who are conversant with their books ; and from 
those books may also be gathered many curious intimations 
of the descent of those mysterious dogmas from one generation 
to another. It may, however, be a sufficient proof of their 
vitality to observe, that it was in order to repress such specu- 
lations that the court of Rome pronounced her censure upon 
Fenelon, and agitated the whole of France by the Bull Uni- 
genitus. 

All the argumentative shafts of the Pyrrhonists might have 
been discharged in vain against such a spiritual coat of mail 
as this. All the syllogisms which Aristotle ever investigated 
and constructed would have been unable to disturb any one of 
the dreams of Madame Gruyon. The Stagyrite himself would 
have been utterly baffled by an antagonist who had so com- 
pletely shaken off all the fetters of logic. But Rabelais was 
the most effectual of all auxiliaries to those who had vainly^ 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 551 

assailed tliese great outworks of Papal Rome with their im- 
potent dialectics. His hearty laugh triumphed over antago- 
nists who were altogether heyond the reach of argument. But 
no alliance could he more disastrous even to those who invoked 
it. He was the intellectual progenitor of Voltaire. He was 
the fu'st of that long line of mockers and gihers who hold a po- 
sition so prominent and so unfortunate in the literary history 
of France. In no other land has such perfection heen ever at- 
tained in the art of drawing merriment from the most serious 
subjects which can engage the thoughts of man. Now there 
is no mental habit so unfriendly to the growth of firm convic- 
tions, and to stability of purpose, among those who addict 
themselves to it. In his own appropriate province Momus is 
well enough ; but when he wanders from it into the regions 
sacred to our highest interests, temporal and eternal, he brings 
with him a moral m'alaria. 

As Mysticism and Q,uietism were impenetrable weapons of 
defense against all argument, so they were very formidable 
weapons of assault against all imputed heresies. I pointed 
out, in a former lecture, the intimacy of the relation which 
they bore to the persecutions of the court of Rome. They as- 
sured the persecutor of his own absolute infallibility. They 
taught him that dissent from his opinions was nothing less 
than fatal. They appeared to him to convict the heretic, not 
of a mere error of judgment, but of an obdurate depravity of 
will. They supplied all the premises of which the stake was 
the actual, if not, indeed, the legitimate consequence. Many 
have been the enemies of the peace of mankind, but none so 
ruthless as the Ideologists. Many are the thoughts which have 
steeled the heart of man to mercy, but none so effectually as 
a " pure idea" in full possession of it. The rapacity of De 
Montfort might have been satiated with the plunder and con- 
quest of the Albigenses. The gloomy purpose of the souls of 
Innocent III. and his successors demanded their extermination. 
Catharine of Medici and the house of Gruise might have been 
satisfied to reign over heretical subjects, if they could have 
been terrified into silence and submission. Philip II. and 
G-regory XIII. were haunted by a dark spirit, which required 
that the whole realm of France should be watered with the 
blood of the Huguenots. Richelieu aimed at nothing more 



552 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

than to crush the political confederacy of La Hochelle. The 
confessors of Louis XIV. could be appeased by nothing less 
than the Dragonnades. 

The Mystic and Quietist literature of France was pre-emi- 
nently devout both in its tone and in its design. But it prop- 
agated those views to which may be ascribed the massacre of 
the Albigenses and of the Huguenots. It contributed more 
powerfully than any other teaching to annihilate, in the minds 
of men, that modest self-distrust by which the uplifted arm 
may be arrested before it falls in vengeance on those who dis- 
sent from our opinions. It fostered what I have before called 
the pride of belief — the pride of him who, believing that his 
own soul is a mirror reflecting the eternal verities of the Di- 
vine intellect, considers it impious to doubt his own infallibil- 
ity. The stories of the Albigensian crusade and of the wars 
of religion are, indeed, so revolting, that the reader of them is 
reconciled to his own nature only by the remembrance that 
crimes so unparalleled had their basis rather in the illusions 
of the human heart than in its malignity. Those crimes, how- 
ever, have not been without their penalties. The royal ex- 
terminators of the heretics were elevated by their destruction 
to an absolute and despotic power over every class and variety 
of their subjects. Those literary teachers, whose mysticism 
scattered the two prolific seeds of those persecutions, were 
therefore, in effect, the most fatal of all enemies to the growth 
of constitutional liberty in France. 

Nor is it possible to exempt the great author of the Institu- 
tion Chretienne, and the " Ergoists," who acknowledged in 
him their intellectual progenitor, from their share of the re- 
sponsibility for the failure of sound principles of government 
among the French people. His book furnished the premises 
of which his Presbyterian scheme of Church government in 
France was the practical consequence. As we formerly saw, 
it was a polity founded on principles as purely democratic as 
were proclaimed in the States-General either by Marcel or by 
Mirabeau. Calvin was one of the "grands organisateurs" of 
France ; and, in common with almost the wjiole of that class 
of French statesmen, he placed himself much more under the 
guidance of logic than of those other habits or powers of the 
human mind to which less ambitious statesmen render not in- 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 553 

deed an exclusive, but a willing homage. He reasoned with 
inexorable precision, and as he reasoned so he acted. To 
compare things utterly dissimilar in every other respect, his 
Institution Chretienne, and the Ecclesiastical Economy to 
which it gave birth, tallied with the revolutionary declaration 
of the "rights of man," and the constitutional act which fol- 
lowed it. In either case the logic was invulnerable, and in 
each the scheme was impracticable. In either case the design 
was to advance the cause of freedom, and in each the result 
was to render that cause utterly hopeless. 

In his study at Greneva, Calvin seems to have forgotten the 
real ^ndition of the people, and of the government of his na- 
tive land. Perhaps he believed that his disciples would be 
strong enough to obtain the mastery of that government. If 
so, it was an entire and a fatal mistake. He established an 
ecclesiastical democracy in a land in which political freedom 
had not so much as a nominal existence, and in which the vast 
majority were the willing subjects of a spiritual despotism. 
No man could reason more closely, and no man could divine 
the future more unskillfully. No vision of such a monarch as 
Richelieu presented itself to his foresight. He did not foresee 
that, by asserting the independence of the Presbyterian Church, 
he was raising up against it a mortal enemy in the first great 
statesman who might be strong enough to assert the supremacy 
of the crown over all the other institutions of France. He fell 
into the error so habitual to almost all French Reformers, of 
sacrificing the practical to the theoretical, and of squandering 
all which might have been secured, in the vain hope of at once 
grasping every thing which could be desired. I therefore place 
him and his followers among those whose writings contributed 
to the growth of absolute power in France, because he, and 
they in obedience to his lessons, presented to the French kings, 
and especially to Richelieu, the greatest of them all, an antag- 
onist which at once provoked and justified their hostility ; be- 
cause he and they enlisted the honest national sentiments of 
their fellow-countrymen against a system pregnant with the 
seeds of national disunion ; because he and they inculcated 
religious freedom in a strain so lofty and uncompromising as 
to render it barren of political freedom, its natural and legiti- 
mate offspring. 



554 POWER OF THE PEN IN FPlANCE. 

It remains for me to indicate (most brieflyj of course) the 
means by which the kingo of France compelled the great au- 
thors of their country to abandon their high and appropriate 
office of explaining and improving the polity of the state. 

During one hundred and forty years the unjust ambition of 
England had inflicted on that country all the calamities of 
foreign and of civil war. That crime was expiated by our 
forefathers in the long and sanguinary contest between the 
houses of York and Lancaster. But scarcely had the French 
people been rescued from the scourge of foreign invasion, be- 
fore they in turn inflicted it on their unoffending Italian neigh- 
bors. In their lawless thirst for extended dominion, Charles 
YIII. and his two immediate successors delivered up the whole 
of that peninsula to misery and bloodshed. This, again, was 
a wanton and an audacious invocation of that retributive Prov- 
idence which rules over the nations of the earth. 

At the revival of learning, an Italian patriot might well have 
indulged the hope of the growth, in his native land, of the sci- 
ence of government, with all the practical blessings which are 
the natural fruit of the general diffusion of such knowledge. 
He might have dwelt on the admirable genius of the people, 
on their unrivaled academical institutions, on their exclusive 
possession of many of the treasures of ancient learning, and on 
the division of the country into several states at once inde- 
pendent and emulous of each other. He might, indeed, have 
anticipated a formidable hostility to such pursuits from the va- 
rious feudal sovereigns of these states, and a yet more dan- 
gerous obstacle in the sacerdotal despotism of Rome. But he 
could hardly have foreseen that a series of new invasions of 
the G^auls would again crush the rising prospects of Italian 
independence. They appeared, however, to the south of the 
Alps, sometimes as the allies, and sometimes as the avowed 
enemies of the Pope, the Italian princes, the Spaniards, and 
the G-ermans, but always agreeing with them in interdicting 
those studies which might have taught the prostrate Italian 
people how their oppressors might be successfully opposed. 
Crushed beneath the combination of those irresistible forces, 
the more profound thinkers of Italy extracted out of their own 
national degradation a new and ill-omened political science. 
Machiavelli taught how evil might be called good, and good 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 555 

evil ; while G-uicciardini, Davila, and Paolo Sarpi assumed in 
their histories that the rulers of mankind were really guided 
by these Florentine maxims. "We are all familiar with Mr. 
Macaulay's profound and beautiful analysis of the political 
morality of that age and country, and with his explanation of 
the methods by which the homage justly due to integrity and 
truth was there transferred to successful fraud and well-timed 
treachery. From this demon worship, however, the nobler 
spirits of Italy turned aside, some, like Gralileo and Cassini, to 
cultivate physical science ; some, like Baronius and Muratori, 
to ir' merse themselves in antiquarian researches ; while many 
more, following the indestructible bent and genius of their na- 
tion, soared away to the regions of creative art, where the fol- 
lies and the crimes, and perhaps also the duties, of the lower 
world were forgotten. In that fairy land they combined the 
wild imagination of the North with the riant fancies of the 
East; and there Tasso and Ariosto took refuge from the world 
of realities in a world of chimeras, where the Paladins of Char- 
lemagne and the story-tellers of Haroun al Raschid meet to- 
gether, and Christian affections are forced into a strange alli- 
ance with the doctrines of Mohammed, and with the magical 
arts of the fire-worshipers over whom he had triumphed. 

But when the French had been driven to the northward of 
the Alps, the punishment which they had provoked overtook 
them. The calamities with which they were visited bore an 
ominous and awful resemblance to those which they had them- 
selves inflicted on the Italian commonwealths. As France had 
carried the sword, the famine, and the pestilence from one end 
of the peninsula to the other, so from the Somme to the Pyre- 
nees no French province escaped the desolating march of the 
religious wars. As France had torn from Italy some of her 
finest territories, so was she compelled to cede to her own for- 
eign enemies her ancient suzerainte over those wealthy regions 
which now constitute the Belgic kingdom. As she had been 
allied with the G-ermans and the Spaniards in the devastation 
of the Transalpine States, so she had to bewail the ravages of 
her own by G-erman and Spanish invaders. As her kings had 
sought the aid of the Medici in subverting the rights of the 
neighboring principalities and republics, so an alliance with a 
daughter of that house eventually subjugated France, during 



556 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 

three successive reigns, to a woman born to be her evil genius 
and her shame. And as the French invaders of Italy, com- 
bining with the Pope, the Imperial and the Spanish crowns, 
had diverted her men of genius from studies -conducing to an 
enlightened polity and to good government, so Catharine' and 
her sons, in alliance with the Papal court, the League, and 
Philip II., banished from France the culture and propagation 
of a knowledge so unwelcome to her infatuated rulers. 

Before the Italian wars, such knowledge had not been alto- 
gether neglected there. Joinville, as we have seen, had frank- 
ly and impartially exhibited the interior, and Froissart the ex- 
terior, aspect of the courts by which, in their times, the world 
was governed ; and De Comines had even been, not only the 
free interpreter, but the enlightened judge, of the policy of the 
sovereigns whom he served. But no similar revelations or 
judgments are to be found in the great French authors who 
succeeded them. The contending hosts in ,the wars of relig- 
ion were all, indeed, assisted by squadrons of light- armed lit- 
erary partisans, by whom libels, pamphlets, and pasquinades 
w^ere discharged in as thick a flight as the homicidal missiles 
of the men-at-arms. But I know of no book written by any 
Frenchman in that age, for the instruction of future ages (ex- 
cept the works of Calvin and of his coadjutors, Farel and The- 
odore Beza), in which the intellectual rulers of the world, as- 
serting their imprescriptible authority over the secular rulers 
of it, have summoned them to the bar of their literary tribu- 
nal. Calvin, Farel, and Beza, indeed, exercised that danger- 
ous privilege ; but it was as exiles from their native land, 
Rabelais concealed the infrequent and furtive use of it under 
the mask and riot of a buffoon. The occasional encroachments 
of Montaigne beyond the limits permitted to men of letters 
were sheltered from punishment, and perhaps from notice, by 
his careless and unimpassioned optimism, by his seeming in- 
difference about any opinions, and by his sportive dalliance 
with all. Des Cartes escaped the censorship of the govern- 
ment by occupying himself in researches in which the most 
jealous autocrat could hardly see any hazard to his own au- 
thority ; and Pascal enjoyed a precarious safety by confining 
himself to the laws of the material universe, and to theological 
investigations or controversy. Yet even Pascal would have par- 



POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE, 557 

taken of the penalties of his great coadjutor Arnault! if the 
grave had not closed over him before the publication of his 
Pensees, and if the appearance of the Provincial Letters had 
not been hailed by the acclamations of a body of whidi even 
Louis XIV. stood in habitual awe — the wits and epigramma- 
tists of Paris. 

But it was not enough for the kings of Prance to silence all 
political speculations, unless they also reduced the great au- 
thors of their country to the degraded rank of sycophants, or 
idolaters of the royal power. 

Richelieu (himself no inconsiderable author) brought the 
men of letters of France into bondage to the court by creating 
a sort of literary aristocracy, composed of the members of the 
French Academy, the honors of which were to be won by the 
favor of the royal patron. Louis XIV. subjected them to a still 
more complete dependence. It was a conquest for which na- 
ture and fortune had combined to qualify him. He was born, 
if not with great, yet with showy and plausible abilities, with 
a princely spirit, a majestic presence, a mellifluous voice, a 
figure resplendent with grace and beauty, an exquisite sense 
of all the proprieties of life, with captivating manners, and an 
elocution adapting itself to all the emergencies of his high sta- 
tion, and alike felicitous in them all. He reigned in an age 
when centuries of civil war and of aristocratic ambition had 
driven the whole people of France to the throne, as their only 
refuge against their protracted and intolerable suiferings ; and 
before a throne occupied by so magnificent an impersonation 
of royalty they appeared, not merely as supplicants, but almost 
as worshipers. Nor was this the impulse of those only who 
were mean in station or in intellect. In the reim of Louis, 
king worship was part of the religion of the men of rank, and 
of genius also. The imaginations of many of them were in- 
flamed by his personal grandeur and by his splendid achieve- 
ments. The hearts of some were touched by his affability and 
his kindness. AVithout presuming to criticise his measures, 
they admired in him the living reality of their ideal of a mon- 
arch, and delineated him in all their writings as the great cen- 
tral object, around and in subjection to which M^ere grouped 
all the other figures with which their invention or tlicir mem- 
ory could supply them. Ftnclon alone, in his character of 



558 POWER OP THE PEN IN PRANCE. 

Mentor to the Duke of Burgundy, ventured to address some 
counsels on the duty and science of government, nominally to 
the Telemachus, hut really to the Idomeneus, of the court of 
Versailles ; and Fenelon's exile to Camhray may he ascrihed 
as much to his freedom of speech as to his quietism of soul. 
The impatience with which, on the one hand, the G-rand Mo- 
narque regarded the interference of his literary courtiers with 
his affairs of state, and, on the other hand, their submissive 
acquiescence in his rebukes, can hardly, indeed, he exaggera- 
ted. "Witness the fact so strange, and yet so certain, that Ra- 
cine actually sickened and died on being censured by his royal 
idol for his arrogance in hazarding a suggestion for the pre- 
vention and cure of pauperism. 

But the constellation of genius, wit, and learning, in the 
midst of which Louis shone thus pre-eminently, was too brill- 
iant to be obscured by any clouds of royal disfavor ; nor would 
any man have shrunken with greater abhorrence than himself 
from any attempt to extinguish or to eclipse their splendor. 
He wisely felt, and frankly acknowledged, that their glory was 
essential to his own ; and he invited to a seat at his table Mo- 
liere the roturier, to whom the lowest of his nobles would have 
appointed a place among his menial servants. As Francis, 
and Charles, and Leo, and Julius, and Lorenzo had assigned 
science, and poetry, and painting, and architecture, and sculp- 
ture, as their appropriate provinces, to those great master spir- 
its of Italy to whom they forbade the culture of political phi- 
losophy, so Louis, when he interdicted to the gigantic intellects 
of his times and country all intervention in the affairs of the 
commonwealth, summoned them to the conquest of all the 
other realms of thought in which they might acquire renown, 
either for him, for France, or for themselves. The theatres, 
the academies, the pulpits, and the monasteries of his king- 
dom rivaled each other in their zealous obedience to that royal 
command, and obeyed it with a success from which no com- 
petent and equitable judge can withhold his highest admira- 
tion. At this day, when all the illusions of the name of Louis 
are exhausted, and in this country, where his Augustan age 
has seldom been regarded with much enthusiasm, who can 
seriously address himself to the perusal of his great tragedians, 
Corneille and Racine — or of his great comedians, Moliere and 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 559 

Regnard — or of his great poets, Boileau and La Fontaine — or 
of his great wdts, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere — or of 
his gi-eat philosophers, Des Cartes and Pascal — or of his great 
divines, Bossuet and Arnauld — or of his great scholars, Mabil- 
lon and Montfaucon — or of his great preachers, Bourdaloue 
and Massillon, and not confess that no other monarch was 
ever surrounded by an assemblage of men of genius so adnai- 
rable for the extent, the variety, and the perfection of their 
powers. 

And yet the fact that such an assemblage were clustered 
into a group, of which so great a king was the centre, implies 
that there must have been some characteristic quality uniting 
them all to each other and to him, and distinguishing them all 
from the nobles of every other literary commonwealth which 
has existed among men. What, then, was that quality, and 
what its influence upon them ? 

Louis lived with his courtiers, not as a despot among his 
slaves, but as the most accomplished of gentlemen among his 
associates. This social equality was, however, always guarded 
from abuse by the most punctilious observance, on their side, 
of the reverence due to his pre-eminent rank. In that enchant- 
ed circle men appeared at least to obey, not from a hard neces- 
sity, but from a willing heart. The bondage in which they 
really lived was ennobled by that conventional code of honor 
which dictated and enforced it. They prostrated themselves 
before their fellow-man with no sense of self-abasement, and 
the chivalrous homage with which they gratified him was con- 
sidered as imparting dignity to themselves. 

Louis acknowledged and repaid this tribute of courtesy by 
a condescension still more refined, and by attentions yet more 
delicate than their own. The harshness of power was so in- 
geniously veiled, every shade of' approbation was so nicely 
marked, and every gradation of favor so finely discriminated, 
that the tact of good society — that acquired sense, which re- 
veals to us the impression we make on those with whom we 
associate — ^became the indispensable condition of existence at 
Yersailles and Marly. The inmates of those palaces lived un- 
der a law peculiar to themselves ; a law most eflfective for its 
purposes, though the recompense it awarded to those who 
pleased their common master was but his smile, and though 



560 POAVER OF THE PEN IN PRANCE. 

the penalty it imposed on those who displeased him was but 
his frown. 

The men of letters, to whom a place was assigned in the 
court of Louis, were nearly all plebeians, but were j-escued by 
the king from the social degradations to which their rank 
might otherwise have exposed them. The graces and the ele- 
gance which, they witnessed in his circle were not only adopt- 
ed in their own personal address and manners, but Avere trans- 
ferred into their writings. To please, and to rise by pleasing, 
became the great ends of literary, as they were of fashionable 
existence. Men of genius sought to please in the republic of 
letters, as they had learned to please among the aristocratic 
companions of their princes. They ascended to literary power 
by the arts which, in that age, conducted the nobles of the 
land to power in the state. They aimed at creating a profound 
interest by their writings, without ever provoking a painful 
excitement. Their books were redolent of the same graceful 
ease by which they had themselves been charmed in the inter- 
course of the privileged classes. They exhibited, as authors, 
the same gayety of spirit which they had seen diffusing, through 
that elevated circle, the transient sense of equality, . so indis- 
pensable to all true social enjoyment. Having learned, in 
the brilliant companies which thronged the royal salons, how 
mighty is the force of ridicule, they assumed, in their literary 
character, all the weapons, offensive and defensive, by which 
the assaults of that great aristocratic power may be either 
pointed or repelled. Diligent students of the conventional code 
of manners, they became familiar with all the signals beneath 
which it commands the polished few to rally, and with all the 
penalties which it denounces against the unpolished many, 
who are heedless or unconscious of that rallying cry. Minds 
born to grapple with the loftiest contemplations were thus too 
often engaged with the most trivial. They were but too apt 
to study the superficial aspect of society, to the disregard of 
its inward state and of its outward tendencies. They investi- 
gated the specific man more than the generic man, the French 
character more than the human character, the empty vanities 
of the world rather than its true dignities, the fleeting follies 
of mankind more than tboir inherent weaknesses or corruptions. 
Molierc himself, great ii.i ho was, condescended to b?,co ;;;■ little 



POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 561 

else than tlie lord justiciary, under Louis XIV., of the high 
court of Ridicule. 

But while many of the nobler pursuits of literature were 
thus abandoned, the learned courtiers of Louis found, in their 
mental and social allegiance to him, the fullest occasion for 
exercising and perfecting those qualities which, at the com- 
mencement of my last lecture, I enumerated as eminently char- 
acteristic of the spirit and intellect of the people of France. 
Their social disposition and genial nature rendered it easy and 
delightful to them to reflect in their hooks, the gayety, the 
grace, and the cordiality of the high -horn associates with whom 
they mingled. Their logical acumen detected at a glance, and 
expelled remorselessly from their writings, whatever would 
have appeared to that fastidious audience either vulgar, or 
exaggerated, or tedious, or obscure. They used the most ab- 
struse deductions of reason, as Cleopatra used her pearls, to 
add an occasional zest to a royal banquet. Their national elo- 
quence shone forth with unwearied lustre, though even in the 
pulpit they never wholly intermitted the homage so habitu- 
ally rendered to their princely idol. But, above all, the un- 
measured obedience of the French people to whatever was es- 
teemed as a legitimate power among them, was manifested by 
the authors of their Augustan age by the most indiscrimina- 
ting loyalty. Because Louis was superstitious and intolerant, 
not a voice was raised among them in defense of spiritual or 
of mental freedom. Because he was an absolute king, they 
breathed not a word on behalf of their national franchises. Be- 
cause he was himself the state, they passed by the affairs of the 
commonwealth as though the discussion of them would have 
been a case of leze majeste against him. Because success in 
war was his favorite boast, they incessantly labored in erecting 
trophies to his military renown. Because he was amorous, they 
sang of love in strains sometimes impassioned, sometimes arti- 
ficial, but always in harmony with the sentiments which ru- 
mor taught them to ascribe to their king. And because he 
was the admitted model of universal excellence, the greatest 
mmds which France has ever produced drew habitually and 
servilely from that model in many of their greatest works. 

Grenius such as theirs could not, however, but triumph over 
such obstacles as these. Even under the spells and the bond- 

Nn 



562 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

age of the court of Louis, she made manifest her inherent and 
indomitable energies. Yet the marks of those shackles are in- 
delibly impressed upon her works. It is for this reason, chiefly, 
that beyond the limits of France itself their power is so feebly 
felt and so coldly acknowledged. Considered as a mere mat- 
ter of taste, this is, indeed, of little or of no importance. But it 
is of the deepest moment to mankind that, in the age and 
country of Louis XIV., literature was faithless to her highest 
calling ; that her great authors abandoned the free investiga- 
tion of truth religious, and of truth political ; that the men of 
the seventeenth century abdicated that high office to the men 
of the succeeding age ; and that Racine, Boileau, Moliere, Bos- 
suet, and Arnauld, abandoned the highest of all the realms of 
merely human inquiry to the fatal ambition of Voltau-e, Rous- 
seau, Montesquieu, and Beaumarchais. Seizing on that de- 
serted province, those great writers assailed the ancient bul- 
warks of our faith in that Divine power in whom we have our 
being, and in those human powers to which G-od himself has 
commanded us to be subject. They found those fortresses in 
France unprotected by any recent defenses, and dilapidated by 
long neglect ; and a century has now nearly run its course 
since the literature of the age of Louis XV. won a disastrous 
triumph, which might have been averted if the literature of 
the age of his predecessor had exchanged the debasing service 
of an idolized man for that service which we are taught to re- 
gard, and which we rejoice to accept, as our perfect freedom. 



LECTURE XX. 

ON THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY AS ADMINISTERED BY HENRY IV. AND BY 
RICHELIEU. 

I HAVE thus far been engaged in the attempt to explain why 
neither those causes which subverted the French Feudal Oli- 
garchy, nor those which seemed to promise the establishment 
of Constitutional G-overnment in that country, were effectual 
to arrest the growth of the Absolute Monarchy of France. I 
now proceed to inquire, What was the real character of that 
monarchy at the period of its greatest elevation ; that is, dur- 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 563 

ing tlie reigns of the first tliree princes of the house of Bour- 
"bon ? If the time which the laws of the University place at 
my disposal had been sufficient for the purpose, I should have 
endeavored to resolve that question by reviewing the progress 
of the Bourbon Dynasty under each, in order, of its five great 
administrators, Sully, Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, and Louis 
XIV. in person. But the pressure of time compels me, for the 
present, to contract that design, and to bridge over, as it were, 
the interval between the wars of religion and the wars of the 
Fronde by a rapid survey of the successive stages of the policy 
of the rulers of France during that period. 

It has been said of Henry lY., with equal truth and force, 
that he was L'Hopital in arms. The principles which had 
been asserted by the wisdom and the eloquence of the great 
chancellor became triumphant by the foresight and the con- 
quests of the great kmg. In an age of wild disorder and over- 
whelming calamity, he was raised up to restore his kingdom 
to affluence and to peace. He appeared to rescue his Protest- 
ant subjects from the tyranny which had so long denied to 
them the freedom of conscience. He came to give a firm ba- 
sis to the national policy, and to open to his people at large a 
new direction and a wider scope for the martial energies by 
v.'hich they had hitherto been at once so highly and so ineffect- 
ually distinguished. For these high offices he was qualified 
by great talents and by many virtues. With a capacity large 
enough to embrace all the social, military, and political inter- 
ests of his dominions, he combined that practical good sense 
and flexibility of address, without which there is no safe de- 
scent from the higher regions of thought to the real business 
of life. The intuitive promptitude and the enduring stability 
of his resolutions attested at once his large experience in affairs, 
and his wide survey both of the resources at his command, and 
of the contingencies to which he was exposed. He possessed 
that kind of mental instinct which advances by the shortest path 
to what is at once useful and possible, and which turns aside, 
with unhesitating decision, from any illusive and impracti- 
cable scheme. Never was a great innovator more character- 
ized by practical wisdom, and never did such wisdom assume 
a more attractive aspect. His manners exhibited all the graces 
of his native land in their most captivating form. Delighted 



564 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

with, his bonhommie, his gayety, and his franlvness, his sub- 
jects not only forgave his vices, but even found in them a 
fascination the more. They smiled at the scandalous amours 
of their gallant monarch as a not unbecoming tribute paid by 
human greatness to human infirmity. If they looked with 
awe on the desperate valor of his enterprises, on the inflexible 
rigor of his discipline, or on the soaring ambition of his polit- 
ical designs, they were reconciled to the stern character of the 
prince by the ever-flowing and genuine sensibilities of the man. 
If his lofty sense of his personal and ancestral dignity some- 
times gave an austere aspect to his intercourse with his peo- 
ple, that pride of birth did but enhance the charm of his quick 
sympathy with the feelings and interests of the meanest of 
them. And, above all the rest, every Frenchman loved and ad- 
mired, in Henry, the lover and admirer of France, and became 
patriotically blind to the faults of his renegade and debauclied, 
but still patriot king. 

And even now, when the spell is broken, and we may look 
back on the life of Henry IV. with judicial impartiality, and 
reprobate the apologies which would have elevated his crimes 
into virtues, we can not conceal from ourselves the fact that 
he conferred on his people benefits which well entitled him to 
their lasting gratitude. 

For, first, Henry of Navarre was the founder of religious 
toleration in France. Until the Edict of Nantes there had 
been many truces, but no real peace, between the adherents 
of Rome and the followers of Calvin. To compel all the frag- 
ments of the Christian Church to coalesce into one body, each 
member of which should hold the same opinions, and worship 
under the same forms, had been the inflexible policy of all his 
predecessors. To acquiesce in their separation, ' and yet to 
maintain each section in the nearest possible approach to an 
equality both of civil and religious privileges, was the no less 
inflexible design of Henry. His charter could not, indeed, re- 
store unity to the Church, but it established, on what seemed 
a secure basis, the unity of the state. The two religions were 
thenceforward placed under ecclesiastical laws widely differing 
from each other, but under a civil law common to them both. 

The secoiid great praise of the first of the Bourbon line is that 
of having rescued France from the abyss of bankruptcy and 



HENRY VI. AND RICHELIEU. 565 

financial ruin in which it had been involved by the improvi- 
dence of the house of Valois. For the completion of that gi-eat 
work the larger share of honor is, indeed, due to Sully ; and I 
will not pause to repeat what I have already had occasion to 
offer on the subject of his fiscal administration. But from his 
own Economies Roy ales we sufficiently learn that, unaided by 
the magnanimity, the self-denial, and the affection of the king, 
not even the zeal, the courage, and the sagacity of the great 
minister would have accomplished that Herculean labor. 

The third title of Henry to the place which he has ever held 
among the benefactors of France has at all times been ac- 
knowledged by Frenchmen with more enthusiasm than any 
other of his services. He was the first of her kings who had 
at once the discernment to perceive how high a station be- 
longed to her in the European commonwealth, and the energy 
to devise the methods by which that rank might be effectually 
vindicated. The project of a great Christian republic at the 
head of which the eldest son of the Church was to take his 
stand, was, it is true, but an amusement for the imaginations 
of Henry and of Sully. Yet, like other dreams it had a ba- 
sis in waking realities. Richelieu, Louis XIV., and Napo- 
leon were but, each in his turn, the practical interpreters of 
the vision with which the readers of the Economies Royales 
are familiar. It contemplated the substitution of the French 
for the Austrian preponderance in Europe. It anticipated the 
great principle of that equilibrium of national forces which, 
half a century later, formed the basis of the Treaty of "West- 
phalia. It was one of those prolific ideas which, when con- 
ceived by genius, matured by experience, and planted in a 
kindly soil, can never cease to affect the condition and pros- 
pects of mankind, but will, from age to age, yield abundant, 
though, perhaps, sometimes deadly fruits. The knife of the 
assassin arrested the execution of it by Henry himself ; but, to 
this moment, the descendants of those over whom he ruled cling 
with undiminished passion to the hope which he first excited — 
the hope that, by the propagation of their language and opin- 
ions, by the skill of their diplomatists, and by the terror of 
their arms, France may at length acquire an authority or an 
influence like that of Imperial Rome over every land in which, 
in his age, Papal Rome had established her spiritual dominion. 



566 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

It is not, however, on these grounds alone that the reign of 
Henry IV. occupies a memorable position in the constitutional 
history of his country. It was a period of great consumma- 
tions and of great beginnings. Like some inland sea, which 
is at once the receptacle of many converging, and the source of 
as many diverging streams, it was interposed between two 
eras strikingly contrasted with each other. It marked the close 
of the mediaeval sovereignty and the commencement of the 
modern monarchy : the first a dominion of undefined rights, of 
unsettled habits, and of a fluctuating policy ; the second a gov- 
ernment absolute in fact and in right, severely consistent in 
its arbitrary principles, but elaborately adapted to the various 
exigencies of a civilized commonwealth. The hitherto unor- 
ganized elements of the state were now, for the first time, re- 
duced into a political unity. The invidious distinctions of 
earlier times now began to give place to social equality ; and 
the slow, though steadfast progress of that unity and of that 
equality may be considered as the subject of the whole of the 
subsequent history of France. In the triumph of these two 
principles consists the peculiar distinction and the chief boast 
of the French polity,, whether monarchical or republican, of our 
times ; and, therefore, the age of Henry IV., when considered 
as the origin of these great national characteristics, demands, 
and will repay, the most diligent attention. 

For, first, the student of that reign will discover that it was 
the period when all legislative, executive, and administrative 
powers were first accurately distributed among the various 
ministers of the crown, and carefully concentrated in the crown 
itself. Secondly ; he will learn that it was then that the nobles, 
ceasing to be the rivals, became the courtiers of their sover- 
eign, and exchanged much of their ancient power and dignity 
for an accession of splendor and of wealth. Thirdly ; from the 
same epoch may be dated the appearance and the recognition 
of the noblesse of the robe ; that is, of roturiers, who, being en- 
nobled by the hereditary tenure of judicial offices, attracted to 
themselves much of the aristocratic importance which had, 
till then, been enjoyed exclusively by the territorial nobility. 
Fourthly ; about the same period may be discerned the first 
development of that moral and intellectual influence of men of 
letters, in the presence of which the influence of illustrious 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 567 

birth and of traditionary honors gradually waned and lost its 
hold on the reverence of mankind. Fifthly ; then, also, were 
seen to arise a class of moneyed men, who, hy fortunes ac- 
quired in commerce, eclipsed the magnificence of the great 
lords who had inherited their estates through many genera- 
tions. And, finally, in the reign of Henry IV. also, the differ- 
ent classes of society were fused together in a manner till then 
unknown, partly in consequence of the participation of all 
ranks in the profound excitement and devotional fervor of the 
religious wars, and partly in consequence of the protracted and 
intimate association with each other, which had prevailed be- 
tween the three orders of the States-G-eneral at Blois, at Or- 
leans, and at Paris, and between the constituent bodies who 
had been so often convened for the election of the deputies to 
those States in all the different bailliages of the kingdom. 

But while these various causes were concentrating the pow- 
ers of the government, and approximating the different classes 
of Frenchmen to one common level, social equality was not to 
establish her dominion in France except at the expense of bit- 
ter animosities and sanguinary contests. The aristocratic and 
plebeian rivalries, which had been suppressed during the wars 
of religion, had not been then extinguished. Those meaner 
passions were striking new and vigorous roots, even then, when 
the external indications of them had, for the moment, disap- 
peared. While brought into an unwonted intimacy by the joint 
prosecution of their common objects, political or religious, the 
Nobles and the Commons were each taking the measure of the 
strength and the pretensions of the other. The privileged or- 
ders were then taught some humiliating lessons of the real in- 
feriority of their own powers ; and, at the same time, the Tiers 
Etat became aware of their own comparative weight and im- 
portance in the state. The conservative possessors of rank 
were exasperated by the fear of new encroachments. The ag- 
gressive aspirants after distinction were animated by the hopes 
of new conquests ; and when the great confederacy of the 
League was dissolved, there had become distinctly perceptible 
the omens of another national controversy, in which each of 
the Three Estates of the realm were to contend for the main- 
tenance, or the subversion, of those privileges, which had hith- 
erto detached them so widely from each other. For that con- 



568 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

flict nothing was wanting but a convenient occasion and an 
appropriate theatre. 

Such an occasion and such a theatre were supplied in Octo- 
ber, 1614, when, in obedience to the summons of Louis XIIL, 
the States-Greneral of France were assembled at Paris. Al- 
though, according to the strict law, Louis had at that time at- 
tained his majority, he was really a boy in his fourteenth year, 
in tutelage to his mother, Marie de Medici. She was the fee- 
ble head of a licentious and disaffected court. To purchase 
the support of the great lords of the realm, she had squander- 
ed a large part of the treasure which had been amassed by 
the providence of Sully. But the sacrifice was- ineffectual. 
Conde, D'Epernon, and the other chiefs of the old religious 
factions, were in arms at the head of their followers. The Prot- 
estants were on the eve of a new religious war. The Papal 
court and the Jesuits were propagating ultramontane doctrines, 
to which the recent assassinations of Henry III. and Henry IV. 
had given a fearful significance. The people at large, espe- 
cially in the south, were victims of the most abject poverty and 
distress ; and the popular writers of the age were agitating crit- 
ical and dangerous questions, as, for example, why the inter- 
ests of a great nation should all be staked on the life of a sin- 
gle man ? and why the welfare of millions should depend on 
the wisdom of that one man's domestic counselors ? 

Alarmed by the gathering tempest, the queen-mother at one 
time sought, in alliances with the house of Austria, a protec- 
tion against the people she had been called to govern ; and, at 
another time, she summoned their representatives to meet at 
Paris, to assist her with their counsels. 

Florimond de Rapine is the great contemporary historian of 
the proceedings of the assembly which met in obedience to 
this royal citation. The general effect of his narrative is to 
show that, in this last convention of the representatives of the 
States- G-eneral under the old monarchy, the three orders of 
which they were composed broke out into an open and irrecon- 
cilable hostility. Concurring, indeed, in that ancient consti- 
tutional jealousy of the crown by which their predecessors had 
been animated, they agreed in deprecating the dissolution of 
the States before their complaints for the redress of grievances 
should have actually ripened into royal enactments ; and they 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 569 

were, therefore, unanimous in resolving to commence their la- 
bors, by preferring to the king a joint petition, demanding re- 
dress of some few of the more prominent of the evils under 
which their constituents were laboring. By this method it 
was assumed that they would deprive the court of any plausi- 
ble pretext for evading the required concessions, by postponing 
their answer until after the close of the session. 

But, though unanimous in concerting this plan of operations, 
they could not agree in carrying it into effect. The Clergy 
proposed that, in the select list of grievances, the foremost place 
should be assigned to the wrong done to the Church by the 
long neglect of the crown to receive the decrees of the Council 
of Trent as binding on all persons within the realm of France. 
To that proposal the Nobles gave a slow and reluctant adhe- 
sion ; the Tiers Etat, a peremptory and contemptuous refusal. 
They denied the necessity for any such request to the crown ; 
inquired why the Clergy did not themselves inculcate reverence 
for the Tridentine Decrees by their own voluntary obedience 
to them ; why, for example, such of them as had two or more 
benefices did not conform to the laws of the synod by resign- 
ing them in favor of other pastors who had none. 

After setting aside the scheme of the Clergy by this and 
similar sarcasms, the Tiers Etat proceeded to exhibit their own 
project. They advised that the joint preliminary petition of 
the three orders should embrace four grievances. These were, 
first, the undue magnitude of the pension list ; secondly, the 
excessive pressure of the failles ; thirdly, the venality of pub- 
lic offices ; and, fourthly, the annual tax, called the Paulette, 
which was paid to the crown as the price of the hereditary 
tenure of them. In the two last suggestions the Clergy and 
the Noblesse willingly acquiesced, because the advantage de- 
rived from the traffic in public employments, and from the 
heritable title to them, was enjoyed exclusively by the rotu- 
riers. But they refused to solicit either a reduction of the 
tallies, from which they were themselves exempt, or a decrease 
of the pensions of which their own orders were the sole re- 
cipients. 

Unable, as the Three Estates thus were, to concur in the 
demands to be made for the relief of their constituents, they 
were still more decidedly at variance as to the demands to be 



570 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

made for the security of the king himself. Alarmed by the 
recent excommunications and murders of their two last sov- 
ereigns, and animated by the habitual propensity of French- 
men to a verbal defiance of the Papal court, the Tiers Etat re- 
solved to place at the head of their cahier a request that it 
might be enacted as a fundamental and inviolable law of the 
kingdom, "that no power on earth, whether spiritual or tem- 
poral, hath any right either to deprive the realm of France of 
the sacred persons of her kings, or for any cause or any ground 
whatever to dispense or absolve their subjects from the fealty 
or obedience due to them ;" and they desired to add the re- 
quest that the contrary opinion might be declared "to be im- 
pious and detestable, opposed to truth and to the constitution 
of the state of France, which is immediately dependent on G-od 
alone." Against this suggestion the Clergy entered a vehe- 
ment protest. They declared it to be nothing less than an at- 
tempt to establish the English oath of abjuration. They an- 
nounced their readiness to suffer martyrdom rather than par- 
ticipate in such an outrage on the spiritual authority of the 
Pope. The kings of the earth, they said, were bound to lick 
the dust from the feet of the Church, submitting themselves 
to her authority in the person of the sovereign pontiff. They 
maintained that such an enactment would encroach on the 
lawful authority of the spiritual power, to which alone it be- 
longed to determine how far the Pope was entitled to depose 
kings, and to absolve their subjects from their oaths of allegi- 
ance ; and, adopting the celebrated Jesuitical doctrine of prob- 
ability, they declared that, in the absence of such a decision, 
the affirmative and the negative of that question were equally 
probable, and might alike be holden and acted upon with good 
conscience. 

Such was the violence of the contention, that the Clergy had 
threatened to retire from the States- G-eneral, and to place the 
kingdom under an interdict ; when, to terminate the dispute, 
the court evoked the article in debate ; that is, they assumed 
to tlie king himself the exclusive consideration of it, and di- 
rected that the passage of the cahier referring to it should be 
expunged. 

The speeches to which these and similar conti'oversies be- 
tween the three orders gave occasion, afford a yet clearer illus- 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU, 571 

tration of tlie antipatliies by which the different classes of so- 
ciety were at this time alienated from each other. Montaigne, 
one of the orators of the Tiers Etat (who has been strangely 
confounded, by more than one eminent French writer, with his 
illustrious namesake), denounced the baseness of the noble pen- 
sioners of his age with a vehemence into which all the wrongs 
which were ever done on the face of the earth could never have 
betrayed the philosophical essayist. " Is he who serves his 
king in hope of a pension (demanded the speaker) a good and 
faithful subject ? Alas for the unworthy Frenchmen, French 
in nothing but the name, who serve your king as mercenaries ! 
If your hearts were touched with the true spirit of obedience, 
you would serve him not for money, but because he reigns over 
you by the law of France, and by the law of nature, and by 
the law of G-od." 

Savaron, another commoner, seems to have excelled in that 
rhetorical artifice by which the deepest wounds are inflicted 
in eulogistic phrases, and the deadliest sting is disguised be- 
neath the most affectionate language. In the form of sarcas- 
tic apologies, he poured out a series of bitter reproaches upon 
the Noblesse. After depicting the stupidity which had induced 
them to abandon the judicial office to men of humble birth, he 
affects to account for it as a respectable prejudice. After show- 
ing that they had abstained from purchasing public offices be- 
cause they were incapable of discharging public duties, he 
sneeringly applauds the rectitude and generosity of their for- 
bearance. And when he condemned the conduct of the No- 
bles to his own order, he at the same time respectfully ac- 
knowledged that the Nobles were their elder brethren ; antic- 
ipating, perhaps, but doubtless rejoicing in, the preposterous 
violence of their answer, that they would not allow themselves 
to be addressed as brethren by the sons of cobblers and soap- 
boilers, who were as much then* inferiors as the valet is below 
his master, 

"We find Robert Miron, a third of these champions of the 
Commons, thus apostrophizing the king with all the energy of 
a tribune of the people. " That man's heart," he said, "must 
be surrounded by triple brass, and fenced with a rampart of 
adamant, who can think of the miseries of your subjects with- 
out tears and lamentations. For the support of your kingdom 



572 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

they toil incessantly, regardless of their health and of their 
lives. They have their sweat and their wretchedness for their 
pains, "Whatever else they gain is consumed by the tallies, 
the gahelles, the aides, and the other subventions of your maj- 
esty. Yet, even when thus stripped of every thing, they are 
still required to provide for certain persons, who, abusing your 
sacred name, harass them by commissions, by inquests, and 
by other oppressive inventions. It is nothing less than a mir- 
acle that they are able to answer so many demands. On the 
labor of their hands depends the maintenance of your majes- 
ty, of the ecclesiastics, of the noblesse, and of the commons. 
What without their exertions would be the value of the tithes 
and great possessions of the Church, of the splendid estates 
and fiefs of the nobility, or of our own houses, rents, and in- 
heritances ? "With their bones scarcely skinned over, your 
wretched people present themselves before you, beaten down 
and helpless, with the aspect rather of death itself than of liv- 
ing men, imploring your succor in the name of Him who has 
appointed you to reign over them ; who made you a man, that 
you might be merciful to other men ; and who made you the 
father of your subjects, that you might be compassionate to 
these your helpless children. If your majesty shall not take 
measures for that end, I fear lest despair should teach the suf- 
ferers that a soldier is, after all, nothing more than a peasant 
bearing arms ; and lest, when the vine-dresser shall have taken 
up his arquebus, he should cease to become an anvil only that 
he may become a hammer." 

In the midst of these sarcasms and invectives was raised an- 
other and a far more impressive voice. It was that of Armand 
Dupiessis de Richelieu, then in his thirtieth year, the descend- 
ant of an ancient family in Poitou, who, after having been 
trained to arms, had been appointed, at an early age, to the 
bishopric of Lu^on. He was distinguished among the mem- 
bers of his own order in the States- Greneral as one of the ablest 
and most ejEFeotive of their speakers. As if to justify that 
praise, he has preserved in his Memoirs the oration which he 
delivered at the final meeting of the States in the royal pres- 
ence. It shows how much he was in advance of his age as to 
the real objects and right use of rhetoric. "With the exception 
of a few occasional sacrifices to the pedantic taste of the times, 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 573 

it is tlironghout clear, vigorous, and to the purpose. It depicts, 
in precise and comprehensive terms, the grievances of the peo- 
ple, but especially of the clergy of France, and dvv^ells with an 
amusing but prophetic emphasis on the benefits which the king- 
dom would derive from the admission of the more enlightened 
prelates into the royal counsels. 

On the 23d of February, 1625, after four months of eloquent 
disputations and assiduous labors, the Clergy, the Nobles, and 
the Tiers Etat presented to the king their cahiers of grievances. 
On the following day the Tiers Etat returned to their usual 
place of meeting, in the hope that s^ome communication would 
then be made to them of the measures to be taken in pursuance 
of their demands. But, in that short interval, the place had 
been the subject of a metamorphosis at which some appear to 
have wept, though assuredly but few Frenchmen could have 
refused also to smile at so whimsical a contrast. The presi- 
dent's throne, the secretaries' chairs, the members' benches, 
and the speakers' tribune, had all given place to painted orches- 
tras, gilded side-boards, embroidered stools, and silken cush- 
ions ; in short, to the preparations for a ball to be given by the 
sister of Louis to the cavaliers of his court. The impression 
produced by this disappointment on Florimond Rapine and his 
associates is amusingly described by himself. " We began," 
he says, "to see, as in a mirror, all our errors, and regretted 
the cowardice and weakness of our past proceedings. Day by 
day we paced the pavement of the cloister of the Augustines 
to learn what was to happen. Every body was asking news 
from the court ; nobody had any thing certain to tell. One 
man depicted the public calamities ; the next criticised the 
language of the chancellor and his partisans ; the third smote 
on his breast, bemoaning his unprofitable journey ; while an- 
other was counting up the minutes which must elapse before 
he might quit his hateful residence at Paris, and forget the ex- 
pu'ing liberties of his country in the quiet of his home and the 
caresses of his family. All were agreed in devising means for 
obtaining our dismissal from a city in which we were now wan- 
dering idly up and down, with nothing to do either for the pub- 
lic or in our private aff"airs." Among the deputies, some, how- 
ever, appear to have been of a sterner mood. One of them in- 
dignantly exclaimed, "Are we not the very same men who 



574 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

yesterday entered the royal presence chamber to complete the 
most important transaction which could happen in France ? 
Or can a single night have so totally changed our rank, our 
station, and our authority ?" " Are we not the same men to- 
day that we were yesterday ?" exclaimed the Abbe Sieyes, one 
hundred and s'eventy-four years later, in the Tennis Court of 
Yersailles. The phrase which, in the reign of Louis XIIL, 
had served only to turn a period, was sufficient, in the reign 
of his successor, to expedite a revolution. 

We must not, however, judge lightly of the real importance 
of this convention of the States-G-eneral of France in the sev- 
enteenth century. Their petitions were productive, though at 
the distance of fifteen years, of some beneficial enactments ; 
and the principles which they asserted were the salient, though 
the long dormant springs of those great changes which event- 
ually gave a new character to all the political institutions of 
the kingdom. Thus the adjustment which the Tiers Etat pro- 
posed to establish of the great controversy of the League, be- 
came the basis, and was almost the text, of the declaration 
framed by Bossuet, and adopted by almost all the bishops of 
the G-allican Church in the year 1682. And thus, also, they 
anticipated four at least of the great political doctrines of 
France in the age in which we live : the doctrines, that is, 
of the equality of all men in the eye of the law ; of the sub- 
ordination of all judicial tribunals to one supreme and super- 
intending judicature ; of the uniformity of the rates of export 
and import duties in every district of the state ; and of the 
right of all men freely to engage in every branch of commerce. 
Concurring in these demands, the Clergy separated their cause 
from that of the other two orders by the extravagance of their 
ecclesiastical pretensions ; while the Noblesse constituted them- 
selves the apologists for all those abuses which were crushed 
at the first rude shock of the Revolution of 1789. Had the 
Three Estates been unanimous, they might have averted that 
catastrophe ; for their united power would have been sufficient 
to have given a new tendency and character to the whole of 
the subsequent history of France. But, by their dissensions, 
they afforded the court of Louis XIIL a specious, if not, in- 
deed, a reasonable escape from all the reforms which the Tiers 
Etat had so earnestly demanded. The time was perhaps un- 



HENRY IV, AND RICHELIEU. 575 

ripe for such innovations, and it was presumptuously concluded 
that it would never ripen. So at least judged the queen-moth- 
er and her advisers. But it was with a much farther-sighted 
prescience that Richelieu had contemplated the scene in which 
he had borne so conspicuous a part. He had observed how 
great was the rising power of the Commons, how enlightened 
their policy, how formidable their moral influence, and, at the 
same time, how ill regulated their passions ; he had studied the 
means of rendering those passions subservient to his schemes 
of absolute dominion ; nor was the period remote in which he 
was to reduce to practice the result of those profound medita- 
tions. That period, however, had not as yet come. 

When deprived of the guidance of the States-G-eneral, the 
mass of society turned for leaders to the Parliament of Paris. 
It was one of the favorite maxims of that company that they 
were les Etats Generaux au petit pied ; that is, that they 
were the depositaries of their powers when the States them- 
selves were not in session. Though it was impossible to dis- 
cover any law, it was easy enough to find authoritative suf- 
frages in support of this doctrine ; for the Parliament had a 
strong hold on the confidence and affections of society. Al- 
though many of the members of it were nobles, the counselors 
or judicial members were invariably commoners, though, in- 
deed, commoners of the highest consideration. Their learning, 
their integrity, and their public spirit merited, and were re- 
warded by, universal esteem. A large proportion of them had 
the advantage of great wealth, and the habitual demeanor of 
them all was that of men justly confident in their own position 
and authority. In them the people admired and revered the 
fearless antagonists of the nobles, of the favorites, and of the 
court. They passed for the guardians of the liberties of the 
Grallican Church, and for defenders of national as opposed to 
foreign interests. Moreover, they formed a compact and united 
phalanx. They were, or seemed to be, the one stable bulwark 
in the state, beneath which the weak might hope to find shel- 
ter from oppression, and under the shelter of which the public 
liberties could be securely nourished. 

And yet, as often as the Parliament advanced beyond the 
limits of their appropriate judicial functions, they were in real- 
ity feeble, if not impotent. In their conflicts with the crown 



576 THE ABSOLTTE MONARCHY UNDER 

and its officers they had no effective constitutional weapon. 
They could, indeed, refuse to register a royal edict. They 
could pronounce eloquent remonstrances. They could retire, 
with the most imposing dignity, into prison or to exile. But 
then their quiver was exhausted. Their political story is thus 
the record of enterprises commenced with all imaginable pomp, 
and ended with all imaginable meanness ; of prodigies of moral 
courage dwindling away into pitiful intrigues ; of patriotic de- 
signs terminating in civil wars ; and of loyal enterprises result- 
ing in traitorous alliances with the foreign enemies of their 
kings. 

Since the dissolution of the States-G-eneral of 1614, a month 
had not passed before the Parliament had embarked in one of 
these desperate undertakings. They had convened all the no- 
bles and public officers who were members, though not coun- 
selors, of their body, to deliberate on certain proposals to be 
made for the service of the king, for the good of the state, and 
for the solace of the people. The arret was a manifest usurpa- 
tion, and was promptly and indignantly annulled by an order 
of the king in council. They met to remonstrate against this 
mandate, and were again commanded to desist. They then 
actually prepared, and, in imitation of the States-G-eneral, they 
delivered to Louis a oahier of public grievances, and were an- 
swered by a peremptory interdict against their farther inter- 
ference in any affairs of state. The perplexed magistrates, at 
the end of their resources, now betook themselves to the debate 
of points of law and to the investigation of theories of govern- 
ment. To cut the knot by which the lawyers had been baffled, 
their noble and military colleagues drew their swords. In de- 
fense, as they pretended, of their company, the Prince of Conde, 
and the Dukes of Bouillon, Mayenne, and Longueville, plunged 
their country into a civil war — a war as ignominious in its 
close as it had been unjustifiable in its commencement. 

Seduced by a donation from the court of 6,000,000 livres, 
those aristocratic commanders abandoned the field almost as 
soon as they had entered it, leaving to the counselors of the 
Parliament the responsibility, the ridicule, and the reproach 
of this extravagant rebellion. 

It was no light responsibility ; for, in the wanton levity of 
their hearts, the Parliamentarians had once more kindled the 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 577 

flames, not of civil war only, but of a new war of religion. 
Conde, indeed, was a bigoted Catholic ; but such was still the 
attachment of the Huguenots for the name he bore, that many 
of them joined the standard which, as his manifesto assured 
them, he had raised to prevent the revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes, and to rescue themselves from massacre. His perfid- 
ious and mercenary abandonment of their cause left them the 
helpless victims of the vengeance which they had but too justly 
provoked. A new persecution fell with terrible weight on the 
Protestant inhabitants of Beam, and those outrages yielded in 
their turn the ordinary and natural results of a vindictive re- 
action. The deputies of the Calvinistic churches, at a synod 
or diet holden at La Rochelle, resolved to divide the whole 
kingdom into eight circles, over each of which a Protestant 
commander was to preside, though all of those commanders 
were to be placed under the orders of the Due de Bouillon, as 
the military head of the whole confederacy. By these chiefs, 
armies were to be raised, officers appointed, and taxes levied; 
but the power of making peace was specially reserved by the 
assembly to themselves. 

The pretext for this traitorous conspiracy (for it was nothing 
less) was supplied by those provisions of the Edict of Nantes 
which seemed to recognize in the Protestants the right of de- 
fending their privileges with arms, and of deliberating in gen- 
eral assemblies on all the interests of their churches. Such a 
construction of the edict was, however, sufiiciently refuted by 
the absurdity of the consequences it involved. Henry IV. could 
not have designed, as assuredly he was not entitled, to au- 
thorize the establishment, within the realm of France, of an 
independent religious and military republic, protected by as- 
semblies, troops, revenues, and foreign alliances of its own. 
No government could rationally admit, or safely disregard, a 
pretension at once so extravagant and so formidable. How 
formidable may be inferred from the fact that, although the 
Dukes of Rohan and Soubise were the only two of the eight 
elected commanders who accepted that perilous charge, and 
although Saintonge, G-uienne, Q,uercy, and Languedoo were 
the only provinces of France in which the confederates of La 
Rochelle found any support, yet, even with their resources 
thus unexpectedly reduced, they continued, during sixteen 

Oo 



578 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

months, to maintain hostilities on equal terms with the royal 
armies, and at length ohtained a pacification on conditions so 
favorable as to show that they had effectually balanced and 
held in check the power of their sovereign. 

It was immediately after this period that Eichelieu first ob- 
tained admission to the Council of State. He might seem to 
have been born to supply the deficiencies of the king, and to 
impart to his dormant virtues the life and energy of which 
they stood in need. For Louis was a man of large and just 
capacity. His ideas of the duties of his station were princely 
and magnanimous. He lived in profound submission to the 
law of his conscience, in the fear of God, and in veneration for 
all men in whom he saw, or thought he saw, any miage, how- 
ever faint, of the Divine beneficence and power. But he was 
of a feeble, indolent, and melancholy spirit. He was habitu- 
ally rapt in reveries, sometimes splendid, though more often 
gloomy ; but he was always incapable of prompt or decisive 
action. Though a king, he never was, and never could have 
been, a free man. It was among the necessities of his exist- 
ence to live under the government of a master. After select- 
ing and rejecting many such, he at length submitted himself 
to the dominion of E^ichelieu, and thenceforward endured that 
bondage to the last. He endured it, certainly, neither from 
attachment nor from fear, but because, as often as he struggled 
to regain his liberty, his efibrts were baffled by his admiration 
of the genius of his great minister, and by his persuasion that 
no other man could so effectually^ promote the welfare of his 
state and people. 

Richelieu, on the other hand, was one of the rulers of man- 
kind in virtue of an inherent and indefeasible birthright. His 
title to command rested on that sublime force of will and de- 
cision of character by which, in an age of great men, he was 
raised above them all. It is a gift which supposes and requires 
m him on whom it is conferred convictions too firm to be 
shaken by the discovery of any unperceived or unheeded truths. 
It is, therefore, a gift which, when bestowed on the governors 
of nations, also presupposes in them the patience to investigate, 
the capacity to comprehend, and the genius to combine, all 
those views of the national interest, under the guidance of 
which then inflexible policy is to be conducted to its destined 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 579 

consummation ; for the stoutest hearted of men, if acting in 
ignorance, or under the impulse of haste or of error, must often 
pause, often hesitate, and not seldom recede. Richelieu was 
exposed to no such danger. He moved onward to his prede- 
termined ends with that unfaltering step which attests, not 
merely a stern immutahility of purpose, but a comprehensive 
survey of the path to he trodden, and a profound acquaintance 
with all its difficulties and all its resources. It was a path 
from which he could be turned aside neither by his bad nor 
by his good genius ; neither by fear, lassitude, interest, or 
pleasure ; nor by justice, pity, humanity, or conscience. 

The idolatrous homage of mere mental power, without ref- 
erence to the motives by which it is governed, or to the ends 
to which it is addressed — that blind hero-worship, which would 
place Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus on the same level, 
and extol with equal warmth the triumphs of Cromwell and 
of Washington, though it be a modern fashion, has certainly 
not the charm of novelty. On the contrary, it might, in the 
language of the Puritans, be described as one of the " old fol- 
lies of the old Adam ;" and to the influence of that folly the 
reputation of Richelieu is not a little indebted. 

In his estimate, the absolute dominion of the French crown 
and the grandeur of France were convertible terms. They 
seemed to him but as two different aspects of the great con- 
summation to which every hour of his political life was devoted. 
In approaching that ultimate goal, there were to be surmount- 
ed many obstacles which he distinctly perceived, and of which 
he has given a very clear summary in his Testament Politique. 
''When it pleased your majesty," he says, "to give me not 
only a place in your council, but a great share in the conduct 
of your affairs, the Huguenots divided the state with you. 
The great lords were acting, not as your subjects, but as in- 
dependent chieftains. The governors of your provinces were 
conducting themselves like so many sovereign princes. For- 
eign affairs and alliances were disregarded. The interest of 
the public was postponed to that of private men. In a word, 
your authority was, at that time, so torn to shreds, and so un- 
like what it ought to be, that, in the confusion, it was impos- 
sible to recognize the genuine traces of your royal power." 

Before his death, Richelieu had triumphed over all these 



580 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

enemies, and had elevated the house of Bourbon upon their 
ruins. He is, I beUeve, the only human being who ever con- 
ceived and executed, in the spirit of philosophy, the design of 
erecting a political despotism ; not, indeed, a despotism like 
that of Constantinople or Teheran, but a power which, being 
restrained by religion, by learning, and by public spirit, was 
to be exempted from all other restraints ; a dynasty which, 
like a kind of subordinate providence, was to spread wide its 
arms for the guidance and shelter of the subject multitude, it- 
self the while inhabiting a region too lofty to be ever darkened 
by the mists of human weakness or of human corruption. 

To devise schemes worthy of the academies of Laputa, and 
to pursue them with all the relentless perseverance of Cortes 
or of Clive, has been characteristic of many of the statesmen 
of France, both in remote and in recent times. K/ichelieu was 
but a more successful Mirabeau. He was not so much a min- 
ister as a dictator. He was rather the depositary than the 
agent of the royal power. A king in all things but the name, 
he reigned with that exemption from hereditary and domestic 
influences which has so often imparted to the Papal monarchs 
a kind of preterhuman energy, and has as often taught the 
world to deprecate the celibacy of the throne. 

Eichelieu was the heir of the designs of Henry IV., and the 
ancestor of those of Louis XIV. But they courted, and were 
sustained by, the applause and the attachment of their sub- 
jects. He passed his life in one unintermitted struggle with 
each, in turn, of the powerful bodies over whom he ruled. By 
a long series of well-directed blows, he crushed forever the po- 
litical and military strength of the Huguenots, By his strong 
hand, the sovereign courts were confined to their judicial du- 
ties, and their claims to participate in the government of the 
state were scattered to the winds. Trampling under foot all 
rules of judicial procedure and the clearest principles of justice, 
he brought to the scaffold one after another of the proudest 
nobles of France, by sentences dictated by himself, to extra- 
ordinary judges of his own selection ; thus teaching the doc- 
trine of social equality by lessons too impressive to be misinter- 
preted or forgotten by any later generation. Both the priv- 
ileges, in exchange for which the greater fiefs had surrendered 
their independence, and the franchises, for the conquest of which 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 581 

the cities, in earlier times, had successfully contended, were 
alike swept away hy this remorseless innovator. He exiled 
the mother, oppressed the wife, degraded the brother, banished 
the confessor, and put to death the kinsmen and favorites of 
the king, and compelled the king himself to be the instrument 
of these domestic severities. Though surrounded by enemies 
and by rivals, his power ended only with his life. Though 
beset by assassins, he died in the ordinary course of nature. 
Though he had waded to dominion through slaughter, cruelty, 
and wrong, he passed to his great account amid the applause 
of the people, with the benedictions of the Church ; and, as 
far as any human eye could perceive, in hope, in tranquillity, 
and in peace. 

"What, then, is the reason why so tumultuous a career reached 
at length so serene a close ? The reason is, that, amid all his 
conflicts, Richelieu wisely and successfully maintained three 
powerful alliances. He cultivated the attachment of men of 
letters, the favor of the commons, and the sympathy of all 
French idolaters of the national glory. 

He was a man of extensive, if not of profound learning, a 
theologian of some account, and an aspirant for fame as a 
dramatist, a wit, a poet, and a historian. But if his claims 
to admiration as a writer were disputable, none contended his 
title to applause as a patron of literature and of art. The 
founder of a despotism in the world of politics, he aspired also 
to be the founder of a commonwealth in the world of letters. 
While crushing the national liberties, he founded the French 
Academy as the sacred shrine of intellectual freedom and in- 
dependence. Acknowledging no equal in the state, he forbade 
the acknowledgment, in that literary republic, of any superi- 
ority save that of genius. "While refusing to bare his head to 
any earthly potentate, he would permit no eminent author to 
stand bareheaded in his presence. By these cheap and not dis- 
honest arts, he gained an inestimable advantage. The honors he 
conferred on the men of learning of his age they largely repaid, 
by placing under his control the main-springs of public opinion. 

To conciliate the commons of France, Richelieu even osten- 
tatiously divested himself of every prejudice hostile to his pop- 
ularity. A prince of the Church of Rome, he cherished the 
independence of the Grallican Church and clergy. The con- 



582 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

queror of the Calvinists, lie yet respected the rights of con- 
science. Of noble birth and ancestry, his demeanor was still 
that of a tribune of the people. But it was not by demeanor 
alone that he labored to win their regard. He affected the 
more solid praise of large and salutary reformations. 

At the distance of fifteen years from the close of the States- 
G-eneral of 1614, he had matured the plans by which he pro- 
posed not only to give effect to the oahier of the Tiers Etat, but 
even to advance far beyond the limits within which they had 
circumscribed their requests. To have accomplished his de- 
signs by the unaided powers of the crown would have been to 
deprive of much of its grace the boon he intended to confer. 
To have sought the concurrence of the States-G-eneral in a 
new assembly would have been to counteract his great pur- 
pose of elevating the crown above all popular control. He 
avoided the dilemma by the convention of an assembly of No- 
tables selected by himself. It comprised fifty-five members, 
among whom no duke, nor peer, nor provincial governor had a 
place. The majority were commoners, but commoners of high 
distinction, drawn from the various sovereign courts of the 
realm. In the States-Greneral, the initiative of all cahiers, or 
requests for the redress of grievances, belonged to the three 
orders. In the assembly of Notables, Richelieu claimed it for 
himself. In his indications of the general objects with a view 
to which new laws were requisite, he more than anticipated 
the hopes of the people. Little is it to be wondered that their 
enthusiasm was fired by projects of which the following are 
an example : 

The king was to be requested to remit all taxes affecting 
those of his subjects who were either engaged in productive 
labor, or suffering under urgent want ; to throw open promo- 
tion in the army to every class of society ; to maintain an ex- 
act balance between the receipt and the expenditure of the 
treasury ; to increase the navy for the protection of commerce ; 
to establish new commercial companies ; to form new canals ; 
to rescue the husbandmen from the rapacity of the troops by 
a stricter discipline and a punctual payment of their wages ; 
and to dismantle every fortress and castle which was not act- 
ually required for the defense of the realm. 

A more captivating programme of reforms has not been pro- 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 583 

duced in our ov/n days "before the National Assembly of Paris 
or the commercial hall of Manchester. It was welcomed with 
delight, and then transferred to commissioners charged with 
the duty of translating these abstract doctrines into circum- 
stantial edicts. But, in the case of the last of his proposals, 
Richelieu saw fit to dispense with any such formality. He 
summoned the people at once to execute the sentence passed 
against the fortresses and castles of their lords. Never was a 
royal injunction more zealously obeyed. In every province 
and city of France, myriads of plebeian hands were joyfully 
raised to demolish the strong-holds which they had so long 
dreaded and so cordially abhorred. The work of destruction 
was done with order and with calmness. Not one stone was 
left upon another which could again serve to shelter the op- 
pressions of the lords. Not one stone was cast down which 
might serve as a monument of the ancient faith or institutions 
of their country. 

The completion of this labor of love was promptly rewarded 
by the promulgation of the royal edict designed to give effect 
to the cahiers of the Notables, It comprised four hundred and 
sixty-one articles, ranging over every branch of the internal 
polity of the realm : civil law and penal law — ecclesiastical 
affairs and education — justice and finance — commerce and ca- 
nals — ^the army and the navy. But the art of codification may 
flourish without any advancement being made in the still 
greater art of legislation. The code of Richelieu, like many 
other French codes before his time and since, was the Pro- 
methean statue without the Promethean fire. It wanted noth- 
ing except a living principle. Its great author had also been 
the author of an irresistible despotism. The elder of his off- 
spring devoured the younger. Having created a power supe- 
rior to all law, it mattered little or nothing what laws he after- 
ward called into existence. 

Thirdly. The strength of Richelieu consisted in his alliance 
with the idolaters of the national glory. By wars, successful 
if not brilliant, by negotiations judiciously conducted, by many 
treacheries, and by a policy philanthropic in pretense, but pro- 
foundly selfish in reality, he transferred to the house of Bour- 
bon the ancient influence of the house of Austria. The once 
formidable armies of Spain were finally crushed at Rocroi, at 



584 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

Nordlingen, and at Lens, and the Peace of Westphalia estab- 
lished among the powers of Europe a balance, of which the ad- 
justment and the superintendence thenceforward belonged to 
France, It is true, indeed, that five years had passed from the 
death of Richelieu before those victories were won, and that 
peace was made. Yet, as they were the immediate fruits of 
his policy, and the direct results of the impulse given by him, 
they were not unjustly regarded as triumphs won under his 
auspices, and as trophies to his fame. 

With what enthusiasm the Frenchmen of his own age re- 
garded the great author of their national aggrandizement may, 
perhaps, be best inferred from the following passage, which oc- 
curs in a prefatory discourse, which, so lately as the year 1850, 
was prefixed, by so considerable a person as M. Augustin 
Thierry, to one of those volumes of the national records, for 
the publication of which the world is indebted to M. G-uizot : 
a discourse to which I gladly acknowledge my own obligations 
for a more profound and comprehensive survey than I have 
elsewhere seen of those passages of the history of France to 
which our attention has been directed on the present occasion. 
" The exterior policy of Richelieu," observes M. Thierry, "has 
the singular merit that, after the lapse of two centuries, it is 
still as living and as national as at the day of its birth. Since 
the fall of the Roman empire that policy has never ceased, if I 
may use such an expression, to form a part of the national con- 
science. It is the policy which the nation has demanded with 
importunity, and with menaces, of each of the two dynasties 
which it has so lately crushed. It is the policy which the na- 
tion demands now, when restored to her full liberty of action. 
It consists in the maintenance of independent nationalities, in 
the enfranchisement of oppressed nationalities, and in respect 
for the bonds resulting from the community of language and 
of race. When speaking on the question of the right of France 
to an aggrandizement which would give her a definite frontier 
— a question often proposed during three centuries, and still 
pending, Henry IV. said, ' I desire that all who speak Spanish 
should belong to Spain, and all who speak Grerman to Ger- 
many, but that all who speak French should be mine.' On the 
same subject Richelieu said, ' The object of my administration 
has been to re-establish the natural limits of Gaul, to identify 



HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 585 

G-aul and France, and to render the limits of the new Graul 
coincident with those of the old.' From these principles, com- 
bined together, and moderating each other, will result, in the 
ripeness of the time, the ultimate limitation of the soil of 
France — of that soil to which we have a title legitimate and 
perpetual — a title resting on the douhle foundation of history 
and of nature." 

The hopes thus frankly, and perhaps incautiously, avowed a 
few months ago by one of the greatest of the living historians 
of France, though originally excited by Richelieu, first received 
a definite form and a tangible substance in the reign of Louis 
XIV. The prejudices of M. Thierry and of his fellow-coun- 
trymen may dispose them greatly to overrate the real grandeur 
of that era. Our own prejudices are not less prone to under- 
value it. In unadorned truth, however, it is the most splendid, 
if not the only splendid, period of the ancient French mon- 
archy. It gave birth to more remarkable events and to more 
illustrious personages than any other. It was then that the 
territory of France received its principal enlargement. It was 
then that the administration of her government was first re- 
duced to any well-ascertained system, or conducted on any 
self-consistent principles. It was the age of her greatest me- 
chanical and manufacturing inventions. The codes of French 
jurisprudence were then first reduced into method, and France 
then possessed her greatest generals and her most illustrious 
writers. 

But there is a dark reverse to this brilliant picture. It was 
in the reign of Louis XIV., also, that France was afflicted by 
calamities fearfully contrasted with her recent glories in arms, 
in arts, and in literature. After eloquence, and poetry, and 
sculpture, and painting had exhausted their powers in celebra- 
ting the triumphs and the felicities of Le Grrand Monarque, 
history had to describe the evening of that bright day overcast 
by famines, by persecutions, by bankruptcy, by defeats, by 
invasions, and by the domestic sorrows which shed so deep a 
gloom over the later years of the once idolized king. But that 
passage of the annals of France is especially important, be- 
cause it affords the most complete exhibition which we pos- 
sess of the real character of her absolute monarchy. To that 
subject I therefore propose to devote my next three lectures, 



586 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

considering tlie reign of Louis, first, in his minority, that is, 
during the wars of the Fronde and the administration of Maz- 
arin ; secondly, in his early manhood, that is, during the ad- 
ministration of Colbert and Louvois ; and, thirdly, in his de- 
clining years, that is, during the conduct of the government 
by Louis himself in person. That division will bring under 
review each in turn of the m_ost momentous constitutional 
questions of that eventful period. 



LECTURE XXL 

ON THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 

Soon after the surrender of Bordeaux to the arms of Maza- 
rin, three of his defeated antagonists accompanied him, in his 
carriage, to a short distance from the city. As they rolled 
along, the cardinal gayly exclaimed, "Who would have thought, 
a week ago, that by this time of day we four should be sitting 
together so much at our ease?" "Tout arrive en France," 
was the characteristic answer of La Rochefoucauld, one of his 
fellow-travelers. There is no better example, even in his own 
maxims, of the art of compressing much truth into a narrow 
compass, than is afforded by this epitome of the civil wars in 
which he was then engaged ; for never, before or since, did so 
many marvelous personages crowd into the space of four years 
so many marvelous doings, to be afterward recorded by such 
a series of marvelous writers. The Fronde is a protracted 
drama, where, in defiance of all French theatrical laws, trag- 
edy, comedy, and buffoonery struggle for the pre-eminence, 
but where, nevertheless, a French critic might be pleased to 
recognize some approach to two of the three indispensable 
unities of his national stage — ^those, namely, of action and of 
place. 

On the 14th of May, 1643, Louis XIII. closed his melan- 
choly life, and transmitted his crown to the fourteenth Louis, 
then a child in his fifth year. In the first week of the new 
reign, the armies of France under Conde won the splendid vic- 
tory of Rocroi. "With what rapture it was hailed by the peo- 



THE MINORITY OP LOUIS XIV. 587 

pie at large, may perhaps he inferred from the exulting elo- 
quence in which, at the distance of fifty years, Bossuet revived, 
in one of his funeral orations, the impressions which that great 
triumph had produced upon his own boyish mind, when a 
student at the University of Paris. All was festivity and joy. 
The ruthless dominion of the austere Richelieu had given place 
to the indulgent rule of the affable Mazarin. The queen-moth- 
er had thrown open to the Parisian world those princely halls 
which her gloomy husband had devoted to monastic austerities. 
Prisoners discharged from captivity, exiles returning from for- 
eign lands, tlironged her brilliant court, to participate in the 
hilarities of the new era, and to solicit compensation for their 
former sufferings. Such was the universal good humor, that, 
according to a courtly hyperbole of those joyous days, the whole 
French language was reduced to the five little words " la Reine 
est si bonne." 

Less obsequious observers, however, could perceive, beneath 
this flowery surface, the widely-scattered seeds of approaching 
disaster. During the administration of Richelieu, many had 
really suffered in the cause of Anne of Austria ; and many 
more now ascribed to their zeal in her service the enmity which 
they had either endured or apprehended from the remorseless 
cardinal. To reject the demands of such ancient partisans 
would be to insure their vindictive resentment. To accede to 
those demands would be to provoke the hostility of all the other 
candidates for honors or advancement. It was an inextricable 
dilemma. A few weeks were sufficient to crowd the chambers 
of the Louvre with dissatisfied courtiers, bemoaning the dis- 
appointment of their long-cherished hopes, celebrating their 
past merits, and denouncing the heartless ingratitude of princes. 
Their complaints and pretensions amused the laughter-loving 
people of Paris, and won for them the sobriquet of '^ Les Im- 
portants.^^ To themselves, however, such merriment seemed 
utterly misplaced. So keen, indeed, was their anger, that the 
leader of their cabal, the Due de Beaufort, meditated mortal 
vengeance ; and, as a punishment for the intended assassina- 
tion of Mazarin, was sent to brood over his wrongs as a pris- 
oner of state in the dismal towers of Yincennes. 

To those embarrassments succeeded financial difficulties. 
The war was conducted with alternate success and failure, but 



588 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

■with an unintermitted waste of the public revenue ; and while 
Gruehriant, Turenne, and Conde were maintaining the military 
renown of France, D' Emery, the superintendent of finance, 
was struggling with the far severer difficulty of raising her 
ways and means to the level of her expenditure. The internal 
history of the first five years of the regency is thenceforward 
a record of the contest between the court and the Parliament 
of Paris ; between the court, promulgating edicts to replenish 
the exhausted treasury, and the Parliament, remonstrating in 
angry addresses against the acceptance of them. In some of 
those remonstrances, Omer Talon, the advocate general, ad- 
dressed the queen-mother in terms from which the orators of 
the National Convention might have borrowed proofs and il- 
lustrations of their favorite doctrines of the rights of man. But 
Anne of Austria listened to such eloquence in a spirit most 
unlike that of her descendant, Louis XVI. She seems to have 
regarded M. Talon in the light of a tragic actor, reciting a 
declamation from Corneille, and warmly extolled the rhetorical 
embellishments with which he had adorned it. Nor does the 
speaker himself appear to have foreseen the approach of any 
more genuine tragedy ; for, just before his delivery of the last 
of those patriotic speeches, he recorded, in his still extant jour- 
nal, his opinion that a great and universal calm had at length 
been firmly established throughout the kingdom. To under- 
stand how, and by whom, that calm was broken, it is neces- 
sary to recur, however briefly, to the constitution of the sov- 
ereign courts, which at that period had their seat in the Palais 
de Justice of Paris. 

In ancient France, as I had formerly occasion to explain, 
the title of sovereign was given to every court of justice, from 
the judgments of which there could be no appeal to any other 
tribunal. Four such courts were in practice, if not of right, 
always stationary in the capital. Of these the Parliament was 
the most considerable. It was a single company, divided into 
five distinct chambers, called the Great Chamber — the Cham- 
ber "des Enquetes" — the Chamber " de la Tournelle" — the 
Chamber "des Requetes" — and the Chamber "de I'Edit." 

First. The Great Chamber was composed of a high officer, 
called the first president ; of nine presidents a mortier (so called 
from their mortar-shaped velvet caps, which w^ere the badge 



THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 589 

of sovereign justice) ; and of thirty-seven counselors, of whom 
twelve were clergymen and twenty-five laymen. These were 
the stipendiary members of the Great Chamber. But seats in 
it belonged to honorary members also. These were the princes 
of the blood — the dukes and peers of France — the chancellor 
or keeper of the great seal — the counselors of state — the arch- 
bishop of Paris — and the bailli of Clugny : to whom were add- 
ed four masters of requests. To the Grreat Chamber belonged 
what was called " la haute direction" of the whole Parliament, 
the cognizance of all charges of high treason, and jurisdiction 
in all cases affecting any peer of France, or any gTcat officer of 
the crown, or the University of Paris, or the hospitals of that city. 

Secondly. The Chamber " des Enquetes" was a court of 
appeal from all subordinate civil tribunals, and from all the 
courts of Police correctionelle. The counselors of this cham- 
ber -were very numerous, and were usually young men, and 
among them were invariably found the most active political 
agitators of the Parliament. 

Thirdly. The Chamber " de la Tournelle" was the court 
for adjudicating on all criminal cases brought before the Par- 
liament by way of appeal. 

Fourthly. The Chamber " des Requetes" had, for their pe- 
culiar province, the decision of all cases specially reserved to 
the Parliament by the writ of committimus, which I formerly 
mentioned. 

Fifthly. The Chamber "de I'Edit" was so called, because 
it was constituted, under the edict of pacification with the 
Protestants, to decide the causes in which they were chiefly 
concerned. 

Although each of these five component chambers of the Par- 
liament had thus separate functions, yet, when any royal edict 
was to be registered, or when any other political question was 
to be discussed, all the members of each met together as one 
united body. The exclusive right to convene any such gen- 
eral meetings was claimed by the G-reat Chamber, but that 
claim was disputed by the others, and especially by the Cham- 
ber " des Enquetes," who asserted an equal right to summon 
any such conventions. 

The three other sovereign courts of Paris were the Chamber 
" des Comptes," the Cour des Aides, and the Grand Conseil. 



690 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

The Chamber " des Comptes" was originally composed of 
officers of the crown, selected from the Royal Council. It 
afterward received a separate organization not unlike that of 
our own Court of Exchequer ; and, as we formerly saw, be- 
came at once an office for auditing the public accounts of the 
kingdom, and a court of justice for the decision of cases affect- 
ing the public revenue. 

A large part of the judicial functions of the Chamber " des 
Comptes" was, however, afterward transferred to the Cour des 
Aides. That court was also composed of officers or counsel- 
ors of the crown. The judicial powers of the Chamber "des 
-^Comptes" and of the Cour des Aides, though not altogether, 
were yet, to some degree, concurrent ; but the Cour des Aides 
did not at all participate in the administrative powers of the 
Chamber " des Comptes" as auditors of the public revenue. 

Finally The Grand Conseil was a body exercising many 
high political functions, but also constituting a court of justice. 
It had cognizance of those cases from which other courts were 
specially excluded. Such, for example, were oases which, by 
the evocation of the king, or by some peculiar privilege of the 
suitors, were exempt from the authority of the ordinary tribu- 
nals. The G-rand Conseil had also, like the modern Cour de 
Cassation, the power to annul the judgments of other courts, 
when such judgments were self-contradictory, or when they 
encroached on the legislative or other prerogatives of the crown. 

The counselors or stipendiary judges of each of these four 
sovereign courts held their offices for life. But, in virtue of 
the law called the Paulette, to which I adverted on a former 
occasion, they also held them as an inheritance transmissible 
to their descendants. The Paulette, as I then stated, was a 
royal ordinance, which imposed an annual tax on the stipend 
of every judge. It was usually passed for a term of nine years 
only. If the judge died during that term, his heir was enti- 
tled to succeed to the vacant office. But if the death of the 
judge happened when the Paulette was not in force, his heir 
had no such right. Consequently, the renewal of the tax was 
always welcome to the stipendiary counselors of the sovereign 
courts ; and, by refusing or delaying to renew it, the king 
could always exercise a powerful influence over them. 

In April, 1647, the Paulette had expired, and the queen- 



THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 591 

mother proposed the revival of it. But, to relieve the neces- 
sities of the treasury, she also proposed to increase the annual 
per centage which it imposed on the stipends of the counselors 
of the Chamber " des Comptes," of the Cour des Aides, and of 
the G-rand Conseil. To concert measures of resistance to the 
contemplated innovation, those counselors held a meeting in 
the Grreat Hall of St. Louis ; and at their request the Parlia- 
ment, though not personally and directly interested in the 
change, joined their assembly. It was a union too formidable 
to be needlessly encountered by the royal power ; and, to es- 
cape such a conflict, the queen informed them that such was 
the profound attachment of the king, her son, for the judges 
of his four sovereign courts, that he would not only withdraw 
his proposal for an increase in the rate of the annual tax on 
their stipends, but would even gTaciously relieve them from 
that burden altogether. 

There is a time and a place for all things, and, among the 
rest, for irony, but never in the speeches of kings. Exaspera- 
ted by the threatened loss of the heritable tenure of their offices, 
and still more oflfended by the sarcastic terms in which that 
menace was conveyed, the judges assembled in the hall of St. 
Louis with increased zeal, and harangued there with yet more 
indignant eloquence. Four different times the queen inter- 
dicted then' meetings, and four different times they answered 
her by renewed resolutions for the continuance of them. She 
threatened severe punishments, and they replied by remon- 
strances. A direct collision of authority had thus occurred, 
and it behooved either party to look well to their steps. 

Of that necessity Anne of Austria was at length profoundly 
sensible. She had all the firmness of her race, but she regard- 
ed with reasonable alarm the results of such a controversy, 
and attempted to propitiate, by conciliatory language, the for- 
midable power to which her menaces had been addressed in 
vain. But the associated magistrates derived new boldness 
from the lowered tone and apparent fears of the government. 
Soaring at once above the humble topic on which they had 
hitherto been engaged into the region of general politics, they 
passed at a step from the question of the Paulette to a review 
of all the public grievances under which their fellow-subjects 
were laboring. After having wrought during four successive 



592 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

days in this inexhaustible mine of eloquence, they at length, 
on the 30th of June, 1648, commenced the adoption of a series 
of resolutions, which, by the 24th of July, had amounted in 
number to twenty-seven, and which may be said to have laid 
the basis of a constitutional revolution. Among other things, 
they demanded that the offices of intendants in the various 
provinces should be abolished ; that a fourth of the failles 
should be revoked ; that a chamber of justice should be estab- 
lished for the trial of the officers of finance for their malversa- 
tions ; that various guarantees should be established for secur- 
ing the privileges and jurisdictions of the sovereign courts ; 
that no subject of the king should be detained in prison during 
more than twenty-four hours, without being interrogated and 
transferred to his natural judges ; that all imposts levied un- 
der ordinances not. registered in Parliament should be discon- 
tinued on pain of death ; and that the gross amount of all im- 
posts should be paid immediately into the treasury, without 
any deduction on account of advances made to the king. 

Important as these resolutions were in themselves, they were 
still more important as the assertion, by the associated magis- 
trates, of the right to originate laws affecting all the general 
interests of the commonwealth. In fact, a new power in the 
^tate had suddenly sprung into existence. It possessed a strong, 
and, at that time, an exclusive hold on the popular favor. The 
authority it assumed was defined by no ascertained rules, and 
was limited by no established precedents or maxims. There 
were, therefore, no assignable bounds to their possible usurpa- 
tions. But that was an age in which the minds of men, in 
every part of Europe, had been rudely awakened to the extent 
to which the unconstitutional encroachments of popular bod- 
ies might be carried. Charles I. was at that time a prisoner 
in the hands of the English Parliament. Louis XIV. was a 
boy, unripe for an encounter with any similar antagonists. 
His court was distracted by hostile factions, and a ceaseless 
war was daily exhausting the resources of his government. 
The queen-mother, therefore, resolved to spare no concessions 
by Mdiich the disaffected magistracy might be conciliated. 
D' Emery was sacrificed to their displeasure ; the renewal of 
the Paulette on its ancient terms was offered to them ; some 
of the grievances of which they complained were immediately 



THE MINORITY OP LOUIS XIV. 593 

redressed ; and the young king appeared before them in person, 
to promise his assent to their other demands. In return, he 
stipulated only for the cessation of their combined meetings, 
and for their desisting from the farther promulgation of arrets, 
to which they ascribed the force and authority of law. 

But the authors of this hasty revolution were no longer 
masters of the spirits whom they had summoned to their aid. 
They had to choose between a hazardous advance and a still 
more hazardous retreat. With increasing audacity, therefore, 
they persevered in defying the royal power, and in requiring 
from all Frenchmen implicit submission to their own. Ad- 
vancing from one step to another, they adopted, on the 28th 
of August, 1648, an arret in direct conflict with a recent proc- 
lamation of the king, and ordered the prosecution of three per- 
sons for the offense of presuming to lend him money. At that 
moment their debates were interrupted by shouts and discharges 
of cannon, announcing the great victory of Conde at Lens. 
During the four following days, religious festivals and public 
rejoicings suspended their sittings. But in those four days, 
the court had arranged their measures for a coup d'etat. As 
the Parliament retired from Notre Dame, where they had at- 
tended at a solemn thanksgiving for the triumph of the arms 
of France, they observed that the soldiery still stood to the 
posts which, in honor of that ceremonial, had been assigned to 
them in different quarters of the city. Under the protection 
of that force, one of the presidents of the Chamber " des En- 
quetes," and De Broussel, the chief of the parliamentary agi- 
tators, were arrested and consigned to different prisons, while 
three of their colleagues were exiled to remote distances from 
the capital. 

At the tidings of this violence, the Parisian populace were 
seized with a characteristic paroxysm of fury. As by some 
magical impulse, they at once fell into ranks, as if they had 
been so many bands of a well-organized army. They elected 
commanders, threw up barricades, and stationed garrisons at 
every vulnerable point of attack or defense. In less than three 
hours, Paris had become an intrenched camp. In the centre 
was the Palais de Justice, the strong-hold of the Parliament ; 
and at the extremity, the Palais Royal, the fortress of the 
queen. No effectual resistance to the enraged bat well-dis- 

P p 



594 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

ciplined multitude was, however, possible. They dictated their 
own terms. The exiles were recalled, and the prisoners re- 
leased. Peals of bells from every steeple, acclamations from 
every mouth, repeated salvos from twenty thousand muskets, 
greeted their return ; and then, at the bidding of the Parlia- 
ment, the people laid aside their weapons, threw down the 
barricades, re-opened their shops, and resumed the common 
business of life as quietly as if nothing had occurred to inter- 
rupt the tranquil course of their ordinary existence. 

It was, however, a short-lived triumph. The queen, her 
son, and Mazarin effected their escape to St. G-ermain's ; and 
there, by the mediation of Conde, and of Graston, duke of Or- 
leans, the uncle of the king, a peace was negotiated. The 
treaty of St. Grer main's was regarded by the court with shame, 
and by the Parliament with exultation. But when, according 
to the terms of it, the royal family had resumed their residence 
at Paris, the four sovereign courts entered upon new and angry 
debates on the final acceptance of that arrangement. Each of 
them fastened on some different provisions of the treaty, and 
each demanded numerous and irreconcilable amendments of 
them. But they had now to deal with a new and a much 
more formidable antagonist. Conde was a great soldier, but 
an unskillful and impatient peace-maker. By his advice and 
aid, the queen-mother and the king once more retired to St. 
G-ermain's, and commanded the immediate adjournment of the 
Parliament from Paris to Montargis. To their remonstrances 
against that order they could obtam no answer, except that if 
their obedience to it should be any longer deferred, an army 
of twenty-five thousand men would immediately lay siege to 
the city. 

War was thus declared ; but never did war assume a less 
imposing aspect. At the Hotel de Ville, the head-quarters of 
:the parliamentary forces, a joyous troop of plumed and silken 
nobles, and a still gayer array of high-born ladies, were per- 
mitted to usurp, not only the defense of Paris, but the conduct 
of public affairs. The fascinated multitude welcomed these 
aristocratic allies with loud applauses, and even the long-robed 
magistrates themselves were compelled to confess and to bow 
to their supremacy. Those grandees had, however, plunged 
into rebellion on no principle at all, and from no assignable 



THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 595 

motives. Some had been seduced into it by mere idleness — 
some by conceit — others by offended self-love — and not a few 
by the allurement of wanton paramours ; and while Conde was 
drawing his veteran troops round the walls, the gallant lords 
and ladies within them were caballing, intriguing, dancing, 
and reveling with an equal contempt of their own reputation, of 
the common safety, and of those high political interests which 
had drawn their plebeian associates into this hazardous contest 
with their king. 

The catastrophe was worthy of such beginnings. With an 
undissembled contempt both for his learned and for his fash- 
ionable adversaries, the conqueror of Rocroi scarcely conde- 
scended to put forth his military skill or resources against 
them. Nor was it necessary ; for, at the first keen blast of 
real war, the belligerent propensities both of the Palais de Jus- 
tice and of the Hotel de Yille drooped and faded away. An 
onslaught by Conde on one of their outposts at Charenton was 
followed, within a month, first by an offer to treat for peace, 
and then by the actual acceptance of the treaty of Ruel. It 
was, however, neither a dastardly nor an unwise concession. 
Gallant as were the spirits of many of the insurgent magis- 
trates, their position was one from which the bravest and the 
wisest might have rejoiced to retire. The post which brought 
the tidings of the attack on Charenton brought also the intel- 
ligence of the execution of Charles I. ; and the melancholy is- 
sue of the revolt of the Parliament in England sounded as a 
dismal omen in the ears of the Parhament of Paris. Besieged 
as they then were by the greatest warrior of the age, they had 
been superseded in the defense of the city, at the bidding of 
the fickle multitude, by a troop of holiday courtiers. Enter- 
taining no ultimate views but such as the most loyal French- 
man might cherish and avow, they were shocked to learn that 
their lordly associates were far advanced in a treaty for intro- 
ducing into the land as their allies the generals and the troops 
of the King of Spain, who was at that time engaged in an open 
war with their lawful sovereign ; and, to complete their dis- 
tress, they were nearly at the same moment informed that the 
queen-mother had just issued letters patent for the convocation 
of the States-Greneral, in whose presence their own usurped 
authority must fade away, and their own persons shrink into 
insignificance and disesteem. 



596 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DUniNG 

The treaty of Ruel was, therefore, not so much a choice as 
a necessity. It was, however, a great epoch. It was the close 
of the constitutional, and the commencement of the romantic 
history of the Fronde ; and such of the occurrences of that war 
as lie beyond it are, therefore, not within the limits of the in- 
quiry which I have at present proposed to myself. Yet I am 
unwilling to pass over so curious a passage in the annals of 
France as that which is variously called either the second 
Fronde or the War of Princes, without at least indicating what 
are the best sources from which authentic information respect- 
ing it may he derived. 

The whole contest, whether constitutional or military, has 
recently heen narrated by M. de vSt. Aulaire and by M. Bazin, 
in works entitled to no mean rank among those in which mod- 
ern historians have emulated the skill and surpassed the wis- 
dom of the great historical artists of antiquity. Of such com- 
pendious and philosophical abridgments of the records of past 
ages, many have earned high admiration, and are justly enti- 
tled to it. The great authors of that class have given the most 
exquisite examples of the power of selecting, grouping, and 
harmonizing events. They have drawn many graphic por- 
traitures of human character ; and they have supplied us with 
many luminous statements and profound solutions of the so- 
cial and political problems of former times, and with many an 
analysis of remote occurrences, around which, as a nucleus, 
the student may accumulate whatever additional knowledge 
his own researches may bring to the more complete illustra- 
tion of them. Some of you may perhaps, however, remember 
how, in one of his graceful flights over the surface of things, 
Charles Lamb had the courage to place all such histories in 
his Index Expurgatorius of " books impossible to be read ;" 
and although the papal decrees of that most elegant of triflers 
may not corrimand our absolute submission, yet the more any 
man descends below the surface over which he flattered, the 
more, I think, will he so far agree with him as to place such 
books among those with which it is " impossible to be satis- 
fied ;" for, indisputable as may be the duty, and great as may 
he the pleasure, of studjdng Gruiociardini and Davila, Yoltaire 
and Sismondi, Hume and Gibbon, who ever yet closed them 
without some distaste for such learned epitomes, and for the 



THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 597 

makers of them ? In the dusty fields of ancient chronicles, 
and even in the flower-beds of some historical romances, may 
be gathered a more vivid, and perhaps a more just, conception 
of the ages which have passed away, than can be gleaned from 
any of those scientific and eloquent narratives. The student 
of the elaborate histories of the Fronde will therefore, in my 
judgment, do well to cultivate the acquaintance of the great 
memoir writers among the Frondeurs. Such, however, is their 
number, that I can at present pause to notice a few only of the 
most considerable. 

Foremost in importance, in variety, and in genius, and there- 
fore foremost in fame, are the Memoirs of John Francis Paul 
de Gondi, Archbishop of Paris and Cardinal de Retz. It might 
pass for a species of impiety to say of so eminent an ecclesi- 
astic that he was a debauchee, a liar, and a knave, if the car- 
dinal himself had not taken the utmost pains to demonstrate 
that such were the habits, and such even the boast, of his life. 
He laid suicidal hands on his own character with an obliquity 
of moral vision unrivaled, perhaps, except by Jean Jacques 
Rousseau ; and yet, in a letter of Rousseau himself, may be 
read the following estimate of the merits of his fellow-suicide. 
" I have," he says, " read the Memoirs of De Retz from end 
to end- It is a Salmagundy of all things good and bad. The 
first volume abounds with touches of great beauty, and with 
many weighty reflections apropos to trifles. The other vol- 
umes are little better than so much verbiage apropos to things 
of great unportance. But what amazes me is to see a man of 
rank and of mature age — a priest, an archbishop, and a car- 
dinal — exhibiting himself as a duelist, as living in concubin- 
age, and, worst of all, as a deliberate hypocrite, secluding him- 
self in a religious retirement that he may appear as an honest 
man in the eyes of the world, and as a rogue in the sight of 
his Maker." 

Hard words these, but scarcely more hard than true ! Nor 
is the explanation of this strange moral phenomenon either 
doubtful or recondite. Excepting only his severe and eloquent 
censor, De Retz was the most eminent and zealous of all the 
high-priests who have at different times devoted themselves to 
the worship of vanity. At her sluine he was prompt to im- 
molate every thing — his friends, his country, his religion ; and 



598 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

even his reputation for decorum, integrity, and truth. To sa- 
tiate his thirst for applause on any terms, he became the great 
teacher and example, to his own and to future ages, of sedi- 
tion reduced into a science. With- all the sententious gravity 
of a philosopher, he instructs us how the people may he de- 
ceived and how they may he agitated ; how advantage may 
he taken of the infirmities of the rulers of mankind ; and how 
even their virtues may he made the instruments of their de- 
struction. Le G-endre, the Terrorist, said well of the cardi- 
nal's Memoirs that they were a breviary of revolution. He 
was not, however, wholly exempt from ambition in its more 
vulgar forms. The first great object of his life was to be gazed 
at and talked about. The second was to obtain the red hat 
of a cardinal ; and he did obtain it by a series of ti'eacheries 
and falsehoods which would have been more fitly rewarded by 
a seat in the galleys than by a seat in the Roman conclave. 
And yet, strange and contradictory as it may at first sound, 
De Retz is a writer from whom much valuable and even trust- 
worthy information is to be obtained. Although no credit be 
due to one word he says with a view of magnifying his own 
importance, and although he suppresses all facts hostile to his 
claims to be the projector of every cabal, the chief agent in 
every intrigue, and the most daring adventurer in every en- 
terprise, yet his self-portraiture, and his delineations of the 
great actors who trod the stage with him, bear the most vivid 
impress of truth in substance, however much exaggerated or 
discolored in the details. So graphic and self-consistent are 
his innumerable portraits, and so carefully are they wrought 
out in all their minutest features, that the most exalted genius 
could never have produced them if they had not been close 
copies of living originals. With all his faults, he places his 
reader in the very centre of that strange society, and throws 
a clear light on the character of every member of it, and on 
the nature of all the transactions in which they were engaged. 
The book is, besides, one of the best, as it is one of the earli- 
est, examples of the force, the freedom, and the finesse of the 
French language. It has all the ease and vivacity of a sus- 
tained conversation, or rather of a story told by the most ani- 
mated of conversers to a group of admiring associates. Never, 
indeed, was genius more perverted ; but, even in its perver- 
sion, it is genius still 



THE BIINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 599 

, Inferior in interest only to those of De Retz, La Rochefou- 
cauld also has left to the world his memoirs of the wars of the 
Fronde, in which he largely participated. After a youth of 
strange and audacious adventures, he engaged in that contro- 
versy, partly, as it would seem, from the mere love of hazard, 
and partly from a guilty attachment to the Duchesse de Longue- 
ville. In her service he sported with his fortune, his reputa- 
tion, and his life, and devoted his great literary powers to the 
single object of making Mazarin ridiculous. But, at the ma- 
ture age of forty-two, he at length retired from these turbu- 
lent scenes to become the centre of the fashionable and the lit- 
erary society of Paris ; and, at the same time, to meditate and 
to write. He accordingly produced the two books on which 
his reputation has ever since depended, his Memoirs and his 
Maxims. Of his Memoirs, Bayle has said that "he could not 
believe any lover of antiquity to be so prejudiced as to deny 
their superiority to those of Csesar," His Maxims may be 
considered as the philosophical retrospect of the experience 
acquired in the calenture of his youth, and, therefore, as the 
most impressive of all illustrations of the guilt, the baseness, 
and the folly of the Fronde. " There is," says Yoltaire, " in 
the whole book, nothing but this solitary thought — that self- 
love is the single motive of all our actions ; but that one 
thought," he adds, " is presented to us under such a variety 
of aspects as never to lose its interest." The Maxims of La 
Rochefoucauld are in fact nothing else than the immature and 
dispersed germs of that philosophy of selfishness which ripened 
into the " Fable of the Bees" under the fostering care of Mande- 
ville, and which were then crushed forever by the giant arm 
of Joseph Butler. 

In beautiful contrast with the Memoirs of De Retz and of 
La Rochefoucauld are those of Madame de Motteville. She 
was one of the ladies of the household of Anne of Austria, and 
in that position enjoyed a broader survey of the surface of af- 
fairs during the civil wars than any other of the writers who 
have undertaken to describe them. Her curiosity was as act- 
ive as her opportunities were ample ; and though she wrote 
as a partisan of the royal cause, she was at least as impartial 
as any other of the chroniclers of those times. But she excels 
them all in warmth of heart and singleness of purpose, and in 



600 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

her abundance and variety of interesting anecdotes. She loved 
and admired her royal mistress cordially. She had no appar- 
ent wish to suppress or to exaggerate the truth; and she is, 
above all things, free from the selfishness which De Retz avowed 
as the guide of his life, and La Rochefoucauld as the principle 
of his philosophy. Madame de Motteville was a true woman ; 
a woman so profoundly interested in the happiness, the troubles, 
and the reputation of her friends, as never to waste a thought 
upon her own ; and to that generous self-forgetfulness she is 
really indebted for an authority to which the narrow-souled 
genius of her great rivals has never been able to elevate either 
of them. 

Yet she was not the most eminent of the women who rose 
to distinction among the contemporary writers of Memoirs of 
the Fronde. The Duchesse de Montpensier surpassed Madame 
de Motteville as much in the marvels of her life as she fell 
below her in the disinterestedness of her spirit. At the close 
of the siege of Bordeaux she became the popular heroine of the 
day. At the head of a troop of courtly damsels she fairly broke 
down one of the gates of Orleans ; and, like another Joan of 
Arc, marched in triumph into the beleaguered city. Enter- 
ing the Bastile while the cannon of Turenne were thundering 
upon its walls, she turned the guns of the fortress against that 
great captain, and, after repulsing him to St. Denys, rescued 
the shattered remains of the forces of Conde. And then, brav- 
ing a Parisian mob in the height of its savage fury, she pene- 
trated to the Hotel de Yille, and, at the imminent hazard of 
her own life, saved the magistrates, the ecclesiastics, and the 
citizens there from the assassins by whom they were surround- 
ed. And yet, if you read the Memoirs of this Penthesilea, you 
will find that, during the wars of the Fronde, and for many a 
year before and after, the real question depending in the wide 
realm of France was not whether the Parliament or the queen- 
mother, whether Conde or Turenne, whether the French or the 
Spanish arms should prevail, but how a husband should be 
found worthy of the hand of Mademoiselle la Duchesse de 
Montpensier I — a question to which an ungrateful generation 
was never able to return any satisfactory answer. 

It was, indeed, an age in which both the heroes and the he- 
roines of French history exhibited themselves to the wonder- 



THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 601 

ing world in characters of the most fantastic extravagance. 
There were, for example, to be seen the First President and 
Chancellor Matthieu Mole, who, after long years of humble 
subserviency to the despotic Richelieu, was now rising to the 
most sublime heights of moral courage and of patriotic self- 
devotion ; and Graston, duke of Orleans, thrust by his rank into 
the foremost place of responsibility and honor, but invariably 
becoming sick and taking to his bed at the near approach of 
danger — at once the only great speaker and the only real cow- 
ard of the house of Bourbon ; and Turenne, all grave, decorous, 
and dutiful as he was, engaging in a traitorous league with 
Spain against his king for love of the unhappy Duchesse de 
Longueville ; and the great Conde, the Napoleon of his age, 
year after year leading Spanish armies against his country and 
his sovereign, from no one conceivable motive except the mere 
wantonness of vindictive pride, and a puerile passion for mis- 
chievous activity ; and the Duke de Beaufort, the illegitimate 
grandson of Henry IV., but better known as Le Roi des Halles, 
at one time playing at tennis in the midst of thousands of en- 
thusiastic Poissardes, at another rejecting, from admirers of 
the same class, a proffered pension of 60,000 livres ; now up- 
setting a public supper-table, at which a crowd of royal parti- 
sans were making merry, and then killing his own brother-in- 
law in a preposterous duel ; but, under his continually shift- 
ing forms of extravagance, remaining still the cherished, or, 
rather, the idolized demagogue of the proletaires of Paris ; and 
Broussel, who, at the age of seventy-two, for the first time at- 
tracted to himself, and never afterward lost, a large share in 
the same mob- worship ; and the Duchesse de Longueville, im- 
pelled by vanity and ennui into rebellion to her king, treason 
to her country, and infidelity to her husband, until at length 
a penitential retirement at Port Royal rescued her from the in- 
toxicating grandeurs, and cares, and pleasures of the world ; 
and the queen-mother, with all the majestic composure and 
inflexibility of her race, triumphing in the protracted struggle 
with the enemies of her viceregal throne, though not equally 
victorious over the frailties of her own heart, and the irasci- 
bility of her own temper ; and Mazarin, twice banished, and 
twice returning from banishment to France, and there alien, 
and tortuous, and irresolute, and rapacious as he was, retain- 



602 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

ing to his latest breath an absolute dominion over the high- 
spirited people who, during four successive years, had exhaust- 
ed against him all the quivers of ridicule, invective, and popu- 
lar indignation ; and in that strange scene was also conspicu- 
ous the young Louis XIV., contemplating, with premature 
thoughtfulness, the events and the personages amid which he 
was growing up to rflanhood, and from that contemplation im- 
bibing an unmitigable hatred of the institutions, and distrust 
of the cause, for the advancement of which his kingdom had 
been so long abandoned to misrule and violence. 

Yet, if the wars of the Fronde had terminated with the 
treaty of Ruel, Louis XIV. might perhaps have drawn from 
them some deeper and more salutary lessons than these. It 
was till that era a contest from the character and the conduct 
of which much practical wisdom might have been gathered. 

The Fronde commenced in the spirit of reaction against the 
absolute dictatorship of Richelieu. But that spirit was at first 
timid, hesitating, and narrow. Omer Talon, who, as we have 
seen, had persuaded himself, at the end of the fifth year of the 
regency, that a great and universal calm had at length been 
established, had the integrity to acknowledge that the judicial 
company of which he was so great an ornament were provoked 
into the disturbance of that calm by no more elevated motive 
than the desire to perpetuate their own offices in their own 
families. If Anne of Austria had not proposed to abolish the 
Paulette, the Parliament would not have roused the people of 
Paris and of France to a rebellion against her. It is, however, 
a very curious and instructive fact, that the other contempo- 
rary historians of the Fronde (De Retz among the number) 
carefully concealed this important truth. It lay unheeded in 
the uninviting pages of Talon, and unnoticed by subsequent 
writers, until very recent students, by referring to the original 
journals of the Parliament, brought to light this dishonest mis- 
quotation of them. 

When, however, though from motives thus mercenary, the 
signal of opposition to the government had been given by the 
combination against it of the four sovereign courts of Paris, a 
great though incongruous multitude flocked to the standard of 
revolt. Among them the foremost and the loudest were, of 
course, those who were enduring palpable wrongs, and smart- 



THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 603 

ing beneath real and weighty grievances. These were the 
Roturiers, who were overwhelmed by the intolerable burdens 
which the protracted war with the house of Austria and the 
prodigality of the court had laid upon them. Then followed 
the Noblesse, resenting the overthrow of their ancient predom- 
inance ; and the citizens of the more considerable towns of 
France, lamenting the subversion of their municipal privileges ; 
and to them were added a multitude of the Tiers Etat, who 
regretted the loss of the franchises which they and their fathers 
had enjoyed in the States-G-eneral and in the election of depu- 
ties to serve in that assembly. Not a few also swelled the 
clamor with imaginations heated by the example so lately giveil 
in England of a successful resistance to the royal authority. 
Classical students again were there with bewitching pictures, 
then first made universally known, of the Athenian and Roman 
liberties. And there were not wanting statesmen of large 
views, who, partaking in the progress of thought by which 
that age was distinguished, had learned, and were desirous to 
teach, that national freedom can never pass out of a name into 
a reality until it shall have been guaranteed, not by positive 
laws merely, but by the unassailable bulwarks of free popular 
institutions. On every side was therefore heard the cry of 
long-suppressed opinions, of newly-awakened passions, of sec- 
ular interests, and of religious convictions. On every side was 
also invoked the sympathy and the support of the power which 
had so suddenly, but so resolutely, ventured to confront the 
throne, and to challenge its absolute supremacy. 

The combined courts were thus hurried onward by an ir- 
resistible external influence into a revolt aiming at nothing 
- less than the creation of a new system, and of new principles 
of government. Nor may we condemn with much severity 
this attempted usurpation. Richelieu and Mazarin had long 
governed France with an utter oblivion of the interests of the 
great body of the French people. The policy common to them 
both was nothing more than the depression of the house of 
Austria, in order that the house of Bourbon might be elevated 
to a power which should be at once supreme abroad and absol- 
ute at home. I will not venture to deny that an enlightened 
and far-sighted patriotism might at that time have pursued 
these objects with all the energy of the first cardinal, and all 



604 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

the subtlety of the other. But to pursue them, as they did, not 
as a means, hut as an end ; not as the means of rendering 
France prosperous, hut as an end in which the rulers of France 
were to find the grandeur and the glory of their race, was as 
narrow and as unworthy a consummation as v*^as ever pro- 
posed to themselves hy men of genius in the government of a 
mighty nation. The antagonists of such a system may well 
expect pardon for some violations of law and even of justice 
in their efforts for the subversion of it. 

Nor was the revolt of the associated magistrates conducted 
in a feeble or temporizing spirit. Their arret, or twenty-seven 
articles of the 30th of June, 1648, amounted to nothing less 
than the imposition on the crown of a new charter of govern- 
ment. Their traditional right of remonstrance against royal 
enactments was alleged by them merely as a shadow and a 
pretext. The substantial attempt and purpose was to wrest 
altogether from the king the powers of legislation, of arbitra- 
ry taxation, and of arbitrary imprisonments. "Henceforth," 
so ran the arret, "there shall be imposed no taxes except in 
virtue of edicts and declarations well and duly verified by the 
sovereign courts with full liberty of suffrage. No subject of 
the king," it is added, " of whatever quality or condition, may 
be kept in prison for more than twenty-four hours without be- 
ing interrogated according to the ordinances, and transferred 
to his natural judge." And to secure to themselves the per- 
manent and undivided power of watching over the execution 
of these resolves, the same arret claimed for the sovereign 
courts a veto on the creation of any new offices which might 
supersede or emulate their own. 

Nor were these the pretensions of wordy and irresolute agi- 
tators only. To carry them into effect, the magistrates em- 
ployed, if they did not promote, the insurrection and the barri- 
cades of Paris. They levied troops, appointed generals, raised 
funds for the conduct of the war, closed the gates of Paris 
against the king, and negotiated a federative union with all 
the cities and Parliaments of France ; nor did they at last lay 
down their arms until both at St. G-ermain's and at Ruel they 
had obtained from the king treaties which were at least sup- 
posed to affirm the entire substance of their insurrectionary 
demands. And yet, in fact, not one effective step was made 



THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 605 

in the wars of the Fronde toward the conquest of constitu- 
tional freedom ; but, on the contrary, that struggle had the 
effect of delivering over the kingdom to a power more absolute 
and irresponsible than had ever before exercised the supreme 
authority in France. It remains to inquire. What were the 
causes, and what the explanation, of this disappointment ? 

First, then, the claims of the associated magistrates were, 
in strictness of law, a mere usurpation. The four sovereign 
courts of Paris were so many judicial tribunals, but through- 
out these proceedings they were acting in direct and unequiv- 
ocal defiance of the law which it was their appropriate duty to 
enforce. Even if the right of insurrection could be allowed 
to possess all the sanctity ascribed to it in a later age, it may 
be supposed that neither Danton, nor Marat himself, would 
have held the exercise of it sacred except when undertaken 
by the sovereign people. Those eminent doctors of the science 
of revolution would probably have repudiated, as unjustifiable, 
a rebellion planned and conducted by a convention of long- 
robed counselors and presidents a mortier. This incongruity 
between the appropriate office and the actual employment of 
the Parisian magistracy threw a constant discredit on their en- 
terprises, and embarrassed all their revolutionary movements. 

Secondly. Not only were the characters of judge and dem- 
agogue inherently incompatible, but the counselors of the Par- 
liament labored under many accidental and personal disqual- 
ifications for the conduct of the popular cause. In that as in 
every other era of French history, the great questions and real 
difficulties of the government were financial. Richelieu and 
Mazarin had crushed the whole rural population beneath intol- 
erable imposts. The tallies, the corvees, and the gabelle had re- 
duced them to the last extremities of want and misery. " Ten 
years have now elapsed," said Talon, in one of his speeches to 
Louis XI Y., "since the country was absolutely ruined, since 
the peasants were reduced to sleep on the straw, and all their 
goods seized in satisfaction of the demands of the treasury. To 
maintain the luxury of Paris, millions of unoffending people are 
compelled to live on bread made of bran and oats. They have 
no protection excepting their utter wretchedness. Their souls 
alone are left to them, and that only because they can not be put 
up to auction." Never was indignation more eloquent or more 



606 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

just. Yet the very magistrates, in whose name Talon thus' 
spoke, were at that very momient contending, with still greater 
zeal, and with all the characteristic ingenuity of their profess- 
ion, against the single equitable tax which the court had ever 
proposed to establish. It was the octroi, or duty on provisions 
brought into Paris and the other great cities ; and unmeasured 
were the invectives with which, in the very midst of the gen- 
eral ruin, the magistrates denounced the injustice of taxing any 
articles consumed by themselves and their wealthy fellow- 
citizens. No men could be more ignorant of the great, though 
melancholy science of taxation ; none more heedless of main- 
taining even the semblance of disinterestedness; and none, 
therefore, could be less qualified for the critical office of trib- 
unes of the people. 

Thirdly. Though great municipal lawyers, the associated 
magistrates had no proficiency even in the elements of consti- 
tutional law. On the 24th of October, 1648, the crown had 
assented to what may be called their habeas corpus law. On 
the 18th of January, 1650, that is, less than fifteen months 
afterward, that law was flagrantly violated in the persons of 
the Dukes of Conde, Conti, and Longueville. But when the 
mother of Conde invoked the recent enactment in favor of her 
son, the Parliament refused to interfere, alleging that, as no 
member of the royal house was amenable to their authority, 
so neither could any such person be entitled to their protec- 
tion. They might have alleged, with much greater truth, that 
the illegal imprisonment of the princes had been secretly sanc- 
tioned by themselves. A body thus ignorant or heedless of the 
elementary truth, that the infringement of the rights of any 
one member of society, however low or however high, is an in- 
jury to all the rest, were but ill prepared to assume the char- 
acter of constitutional vindicators of the national liberties. 

Fourthly. It is seldom given to individual men to emanci- 
pate their minds from bondage to the prejudices of their pro- 
fession. To professional assemblages that freedom of mind is 
always unknown and unattainable. Whether they deliberated 
on the affairs of the commonwealth, or projected political meas- 
ures, or made war, or entered into treaties, the counselors of 
the Parliament still wrapped themselves up in their long robes, 
their legal fictions, and their judicial subtleties. Never were 



THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 607 

a party in the state so destitute of the power of taking the 
straight path toward their end, or of using simple words to ex- 
press their real meaning. For example, the twenty-seven ar- 
ticles of their confederation of the 30th of June, 1648 ; the 
treaty of St. G-ermain of September in the same year ; and the 
treaty of Ruel of March, 1649, form the three pivots of their 
whole policy. And yet it may well he doubted whether those 
great constitutional acts, when read and collated together, 
would at this day convey to any man, uninformed of the liistory 
of those times, any definite meaning whatever. Thus the gTcat 
principle that no prisoner should be confined during twenty- 
four hours without being interrogated and transferred to his 
natural judges, though plamly enough stated in the articles of 
June, 1648, is laid down in the treaty of St. Grermain in words 
selected by the Parliament themselves, which words are as fol- 
lows : "No subject of the king shall hereafter be prosecuted 
as a criminal, except according to the forms prescribed by the 
laws and ordinances of the kingdom ; and the ordinance of 
King Louis XL, of October, 1467, shall be observed according 
to its form and tenor." The lawyers who put together these 
words might see in them a perfect assent to their correspond- 
ing article of June, 1648, and a perfect security for the liberty 
of the subject ; for they were so many hierophants who could 
not abide a plain-spoken oracle. They preferred a riddle, of 
which the key was in their own keeping, to any words which 
had the inconvenience of being universally intelligible. But 
never yet was a free constitution erected on legal enigmas, or 
built up by the labors of schoolmen. They who would govern 
the world must condescend to make use of the world's lan- 
guage. The articles of June, 1648, were plain enough, but 
they were invalid except in so far as they were ratified by the 
treaties. Now the treaty of St. Grermain said nothing dis- 
tinctly, and the treaty of Ruel said absolutely nothing at all 
respectmg the great constitutional questions Avhich those arti- 
cles had been designed to regulate. 

Fifthly. If the pretensions of the Parliament had been real- 
ly successful, the effect must have been to supersede the au- 
thority of the States- G-eneral, and to break up the kingdom of 
France into a system of confederated states or governments, as 
numerous as the sovereign courts or Parliaments of the realm. 



608 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 

All good Frenclimen deprecated such a result ; and the ob- 
vious tendency of the measures of the associated magistrates 
to produce it, greatly impaired their influence with that great 
hut tranquil majority, who will always prefer the permanent 
welfare of their country to the triumph of the agitators of the 
passing day. 

Sixthly. There was also in France, at that time, a multi- 
tude of persons who contemplated with alarm the seeming pro- 
pensity of the French Parliament to imitate the revolutionary 
example of the Parliament of England. The monarchy of a 
thousand years was still dear and venerable to most of those 
who had grown up beneath its shelter, and the supposed ene- 
mies of it were regarded by them with alarm and jealousy. 

Seventhly. To men accustomed to reflect, the success of 
the Parliament held out the unwelcome prospect of the intro- 
duction of a polity never before heard of in the world, and 
hardly to be reconciled with the maxims which had been re- 
ceived among men as fundamental on the subject of civil gov- 
ernment. It would have been a fusion of all legislative, ad- 
ministrative, and judicial powers ; a combination of them all, 
in the hands of men trained to the study and practice of the 
law, and forming a kind of hereditary caste, neither selected 
by the people, nor chosen from among the ancient aristocracy, 
nor appointed by the crown. An oligarchy in any form was 
sufficiently formidable to Frenchmen ; but, from an oligarchy 
of lawyers, they could anticipate nothing which any class of 
society could regard either with respect, or confidence, or at- 
tachment. 

Eighthly. The failure of the associated magistracy to ac- 
complish the purposes of their union is also to be ascribed to 
the coincidence of the religious with the political division of 
parties. The Jansenists were Parliamentarians, and the Jes- 
uits Royalists. As in England, the Independents and the 
Episcopalians selected their positions in the state according to 
their relations to the Church, so in France, the innovators in 
the ecclesiastical society were also promoters of changes in the 
commonwealth. And hence it happened that all the more 
zealous adherents of sacerdotal power were, in eithsr country, 
the devoted supporters of the monarchical authority. It was 
in no small degree by their aid that Louis XIV. filially tri- 



THE BIONARCHY OF LOUIS XIV. 609 

umphed over both the first and the second Frondeurs, and to 
these early recollections must he ascribed no small part of the 
animosity with which, at a later period, he regarded and per- 
secuted the family of Arnauld, and the whole body of their 
proselytes at Port Royal. 

Ninthly. But of all the causes which contributed to neu- 
tralize and defeat the efforts of the Fronde to reform the French 
government, none was so effectual as the alliance into which 
the Frondeurs were forced with their aristocratic associates, 
and especially with the family of Conde. That association 
rapidly destroyed whatever was popular, and generous, and 
patriotic in the movement of the Reformers. It rendered the 
cause and the interests of the people at large subservient to the 
selfish objects of the Noblesse. They were the too faithful 
successors and representatives of the old feudal seigneurs. In 
their hands, the contest whoUy changed its character and its 
purposes. It degenerated from a high principle into a paltry 
fashion. It was rendered ludicrous by the folhes of the court- 
ly ladies, who assumed so conspicuous a share in the du-ection 
of it, and hateful by the traitorous alliance into which the 
Frondeurs were drawn with the foreign enemies and invaders 
of the kingdom. 

And, finally, while France was desolated by this civil war, 
and was witnessing the decline of the influence of the authors 
of it, the young king was growing up to manhood, adorned 
with every kingly grace, and attracting universal admiration 
by his real, and still more by his supposed talents and capaci- 
ty for government. So rapid and complete was the growth of 
his personal authority, that, before he had completed his twen- 
tieth year, the astonished and now subdued Parliament saw 
him appear in his riding-dress among them, to command the 
acceptance of his edicts, in language and in a tone which Com- 
modius would not have hazarded with his abject senators. 
The Fronde had been a reaction against the dictatorship of 
Richelieu. The reign of Louis XIV. was a still more com- 
plete and protracted reaction against the ill-conceived and ill- 
conducted efforts of the Fronde, to substitute a free for an ab- 
solute government in France. 



610 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 



LECTURE XXII. 

ON THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY AS ADMINISTERED BY COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 

The administration of Cardinal Mazarin, so far as it has a 
conspicuous place in the history of the civil government of 
France, begins and closes with the wars of the Fronde. His 
name, once so sacred to ohloquy that a Mazarinade and a sa- 
tirical libel had become convertible terms in the French lan- 
guage, has, sincehis death, and especially of late years, ac- 
quired a perpetually-increasing lustre ; for in that enthusiastic 
land there is no offense which will not be pardoned, no applause 
which will not be given, to any one whose fortune it has been 
to augment the sum of what is there considered as the nation- 
al glory. And although Mazarin long protracted an unneces- 
sary war — though he plunged the state into an abyss of finan- 
cial difficulties — though in the midst of the public distress he 
accumulated a fortune which would be inadequately repre- 
sented at the present day by sixteen millions of pounds ster- 
ling — though his government was signalized by no one meas- 
ure of legislative or administrative wisdom — ^though he was 
insincere and timid, and (to the utmost of his faint daring) an 
oppressor, yet we can not deny him the praise of having adopt- 
ed both the foreign and domestic policy of Richelieu in the true 
spirit of that unscrupulous dictator. In the wars of the Fronde 
he played the patrician and the plebeian orders against each 
other to the common depression of them both ; and by the treaty 
of the Pyrenees he accomplished that matrimonial alliance, 
which laid the basis of the long subjection of the monarchy 
of Spain to the crown of France. At length, on the 9th of 
,March, 1661, he died, leaving in the hands of the youthful 
Louis XIY. a power more absolute than had ever been enjoyed 
by any of the successors of Charlemagne, with the not unrea- 
sonable prospect of transmitting to his own successors a do- 
minion embracing many of the fairer provinces of the Charlo- 
vingian empire. Early on the morning of the following day. 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 



611 



the king, having assembled his council, addressed them in the 
following words : "I have called you together to say, that 
though hitherto I have been well satisfied that my government 
should be conducted by the late cardinal, I intend hencefor- 
ward to govern in my own person. You will assist me with 
your advice whenever I shall demand it." From that hour to 
his last, Louis XIV. appeared to the world at large, and even 
to himself, to be the supreme, if not the sole, administrator of 
the affairs of his kingdom. 

He had many royal qualities — a noble presence — manners 
full of grace and dignity — an elocution at once majestic and 
seductive — unwearied assiduity in business — a luminous un- 
derstanding — an instinctive taste for whatever is magnificent 
in thought or action, and a genuine zeal for the welfare of his 
people. But for the high office of molding and conducting the 
policy of the greatest of the nations of the civilized world, he 
wanted three indispensable gifts : an education so liberal as to 
have revealed to him the real interests and resources of his 
kingdom ; the faculty by which a true statesman, in the si- 
lence of all established precedents, originates measures adapt- 
ed to the innovations, whether progressive or immediate, of his 
times ; and that dominion over passion and appetite which is 
the one essential condition of all true mental independence. 
Without such knowledge, such invention, and such self-con- 
trol, Louis could not really think, and, therefore, could not re- 
ally act, for himself. 

It was consequently inevitable that the office of thinking 
and of acting for him should be devolved on some minister ; 
and Jean Baptiste Colbert was, ere long, called to the dis- 
charge of that arduous duty. Colbert was the son of a mer- 
chant of Rheims, and had held the place of intend ant in the 
household of Mazarin. In that employment he had earned the 
reputation of great skill and diligence in managing the colos- 
sal fortune of his master, and in detecting the frauds by which 
the officers of the royal revenue had enriched themselves at the 
public expense. His own integrity was universally acknowl- 
edged, but the respect commanded by his talents and his vir- 
tue was not a willing nor an affectionate tribute. No man, 
indeed, could be more unpopular, for no man was more severe, 
morose, and repulsive, even toward those whom he most de- 



612 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

sired to conciliate. Hostile as such an origin, such pursuits, 
and such a demeanor might be to his success with others, it 
would have been impossible for him to have combined together 
a greater number of powerful recommendations than these to 
the favor of the young king. Supported by no family connec- 
tions or personal attachments, and inured to an obscure and 
useful drudgery, Colbert seemed of all men the best qualified 
to render to Louis those humble but effective services, which, 
while they would relieve himself from the toils incompatible 
with his kingly state and with his youthful enjoyments, would 
still leave to him the glory of governing, or of seeming to gov- 
ern, his vast hereditary possessions. At first, therefore, Col- 
bert was privately consulted by his sovereign on some urgent 
fiscal questions ; then employed in prosecuting Fouquet, the 
superintendent of finance, whose peculations he had brought 
to light ; then admitted to a seat in the royal council ; then 
intrusted with the subordinate function of intendant of finance ; 
then appointed to superintend the works and buildings of the 
king ; then elevated to the post of controller general ; and finally 
promoted to the office of secretary of state for the marine and 
the colonies. During each successive step of his upward prog- 
ress, the harsh and inflexible minister made many enemies and 
few friends. Yet he was seldom or never betrayed into the 
fault of an arrogant self-importance. It was, on the contrary, 
his habit to depreciate his own power and influence — a habit 
in which he was not improbably sincere, as he certainly was 
discreet. He habitually spoke and wrote of himself as a mere 
subaltern, and as unable either to decide on any measure, or 
to confer any place or advantage except by the express com- 
mand of his royal master. Charmed with a servant so upright, 
painstaking, and unobtrusive, and so destitute of political or 
domestic alliances, the king could not, or would not, perceive 
that this lowly dependent was in reality becoming his indis- 
pensable ruler. Read the instructions of Louis to the Dau- 
phin, and you will conclude that every material act of his 
government was dictated by himself and executed by Colbert. 
Read the authentic documents of that age, and you will be 
convinced that every measure which Louis dictated to Colbert 
had first been suggested by Colbert to Louis. The power of 
the magnificent Richelieu was, m effect, revived in the unos- 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 613 

tentatious Colbert, with, the difference that, while Louis XIII. 
had retreated into ohscurity, and had been consigned to his 
confessor and to his oratory, that way might be made for the 
haughty cardinal, Louis XIY., both in the cabinet, in the field, 
on the throne, and in every princely pageant, assumed the im- 
posing majesty of an autocratic sovereign, in whose presence 
all inferior dignitaries appeared but as so many dependent 
satellites. The theatrical exhibition was altogether changed ; 
but the plot and characters of the drama were scarcely altered. 

Dropping, then, the fiction which ascribes the authorship of 
all royal acts to the monarch in whose name they are done, I 
shall consider the reign of Louis XIV., from 1661 to 1672, as 
really constituting the administration of Jean Baptiste Cojbert. 

A Protectionist in England and a Colbertiste in France are 
the same. Yet, in the war against free trade, our neighbors 
have inscribed on their banners a nom de guerre of much 
greater force and precision than our own. Their Colbert is 
the very Newton or Linnaeus of the science of commercial re- 
striction. The civil government of their country, as adminis- 
tered by him, was a series of crucial experiments on the sound- 
ness of the doctrines which that science inculcates. They were 
tried on the shipping and navigation of France — on her corn 
trade — on the export of coin — on her foreign commerce — and 
on her domestic manufactures. Asserting the broad principle 
that a people laboring under fiscal burdens of unrivaled mag- 
nitude could prosper only by such laws, protecting and prohib- 
itory, as would secure to national products a preference in the 
home market over the similar products of foreign countries, 
the great economist of that age brought all his large experi- 
ence, all his preternatural diligence, and all his unlimited pow- 
er, to animate and sustain the industry of France by protective 
legislation. What were the nature and what the results of 
his experiments? 

First, then, with regard to the shipping and navigation of 
France. As early as the thirteenth century, the people of Hol- 
land and Zealand, an amphibious, hardy, and frugal race, had 
engrossed the cod and herring fisheries, and were able to build 
and to navigate vessels on terms with which no other nation 
could successfully compete. They became the maritime car- 
riers of Europe. They triumphed over the commercial jealousy 



614 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

of England, and the restrictive laws of Edward IV. They tri- 
umphed still more completely over the tyranny and persecution 
of Spain, and, while struggling for existence against the vic- 
torious arms of iVlva and of Alexander Farnese, they rapidly 
extended their commerce over the eastern and western pos- 
Hsessions of Philip II., until at length the treaty of Westphalia 
guaranteed to them Java and the Moluccas, with all their fac- 
tories in Ceylon and the continent of India, and the exclusive 
enjoyment of the spice trade. Such was at that time their 
prosperity, that, about two years before the death of Mazarin, 
they possessed between 15,000 and 16,000 sea-going vessels, 
while France could number at the most from 500 to 600. 
■ To destroy this humiliating superiority, a series of edicts 
were promulgated by Fouquet, the then superintendent of 
finance, imposing a duty of fifty sous per ton on every foreign 
ship entering or quitting any French port. During several 
successive years the Dutch embassador at Paris exhausted all 
the resources of diplomatic skill and eloquence in a series of 
importunate remonstrances against this impost. He might as 
well have expostulated with the tides against their assaults on 
the dikes of his native land. Colbert remained inexorable ; 
and, with no substantial change, the discriminating tonnage 
duty continued in force till long after the end of his adminis- 
tration. 

These fiscal hostilities with the Dutch were nearly coinci- 
dent in point of time with our own Navigation Act, and were 
far less stringent. Now Adam Smith has applauded the policy 
of our forefathers in thus effecting the transfer to this country 
of much of the maritime power of Holland, and has taught 
that, in order to promote the higher interests of our national 
strength and safety, the pecuniary sacrifice involved in the 
compulsory employment of our ov/n more costly shipping was 
wisely incurred. If, in deference to the authority or to the 
reasoning of Adam Smith, we may conclude Cromwell to have 
been right, with what consistency can we also conclude that 
Colbert was wrong ? 

The two opinions, however apparently in conflict with each 
other, may, perhaps, be reconciled by observing first, that the 
mere pecuniary sacrifice made by England was soon and effect- 
ually repaid by the growth of an English com.mercial navy, far 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 615 

surpassing that of our Dutch rivals ; whereas in France, the 
Dutch, after the restrictive law against their shipping, still re- 
tained the greater part of the French carrying trade, so that 
the French tonnage duty produced little or no other direct re- 
sult than that of enhancing the freight of all sea-borne goods. 
Secondly ; the inestimable advantage of national safety, which 
appeared to Adam Smith to apologize for the unthriftiness of 
our own law, was not in question in France, and, therefore, 
did not afford a corresponding defense for the mercantile dis- 
advantages to which the French people were subjected by their 
attempted disuse of the best and cheapest maritime convey- 
ances. And, thirdly, to England, in the time of the Common- 
wealth, the friendship or the enmity of Holland seemed to 
promise or to menace but little, whereas to France the amica- 
ble relations which she had maintained with the United Prov- 
inces for the last preceding eighty years were of inappreciable 
value. Yet those relations were suspended by the French ton- 
nage law, and not long after gave place altogether to the wars 
which, during half a century, consigned both France and Hol- 
land to a succession of overwhelming sufferings. In a word, 
by the abandonment of the great mercantile principle, that the 
cheapest service is the best, Cromwell reaped great gain and 
little loss, Colbert reaped great loss and little gain. 
. Secondly. The trade in corn was subjected by Colbert to 
experiments of yet more serious importance. 

Until the reign of Charles V., France had ever enjoyed a 
perfect freedom of exporting corn to all other countries. After 
that period, the right was occasionally suspended by royal or-, 
dinances. But Francis I. and Henry lY., and even Louis XIY., 
under the administration of Mazarin, had fully and emphatic- 
ally re-established it. In the year 1661, however, France was 
afflicted with a scarcity which might almost be described as a 
famine, and, after waging an ineffectual war against it by the 
usual methods of forbidding accumulations of grain in private 
hands, and fixing a maximum price of corn, Colbert retained 
in his mind an indelible impression of the horrors of that fatal 
season. To prevent their recurrence, he obtained, toward the 
close of every future harvest, official returns of its probable 
productiveness. If the crops had been plentiful, he authorized 
the free exportation of corn for a year, or for a few months, or 



616 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

weeks, as he judged best. If the supply did not seem to him 
abundantly adequate to the wants of the people, he imposed a 
temporary export duty of greater or less amount. If he saw 
cause to anticipate a deficiency, he forbade the exportation al- 
together. 

No man, therefore, could safely engage in the growth of corn 
in France for sale in any other country ; for, however high the 
prices in the foreign markets might eventually be, as compared 
with the prices in the French markets, it depended entirely on 
the future decision of Colbert whether the owners of it should 
or should not have the power of availing themselves of that 
advantage. The results of course were, first, that the export 
of grain from France ceased altogether ; secondly, that all the 
inferior soils were thrown out of cultivation, the superior soils 
alone being brought under tillage ; and, thirdly, that there was 
a constant risk, and not seldom an actual production, of scar- 
city, and even of famine. Except in extreme exigencies of 
that kind, corn could never be sold at any considerable profit 
to the agriculturist. He was, therefore, condemned to habit- 
ual poverty, and his inability to purchase manufactured goods 
deprived the producers of them of their most important cus- 
tomers. Such, at least, are the consequences which our own 
economical theories would ascribe to such an interference of 
the government with the natural course of the corn trade. 
How far are we able, from any direct evidence, to verify or to 
disprove those anticipations ? 

They might be verified from the many still extant reports 
addressed to Colbert by the intendants of the various provinces 
of France, and especially by the intendants of Gascony, Poi- 
tou, and Dauphine. But we have a memoir, transmitted by 
the minister himself to the king in the year 1681, in which the 
great author of this system thus sums up the result of it : 
" The most important fact of all," he says, "and that which 
demands the greatest reflection, is the excessive misery of the 
people. It is announced in all the letters which reach us from 
the provinces, whoever may be the writers of them, whether 
intendants, receivers general, or even bishops." Seventeen 
years later, Marshal Vauban, whose public spirit was not in- 
ferior to his military science, drew up his celebrated account 
of the state of France, in which he declared that a tenth part 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 617 

of the whole population were reduced to pauperism ; that five 
other tenth parts of it were so poor as to be unable to contrib- 
ute any thing to the relief of the destitute ; that three other 
tenth parts were grievously straitened in their circumstances, 
and oppressed by debt ; and that, in the only remaining tenth 
part, there were not ten thousand families in perfectly easy 
circumstances. That Colbert sincerely desired, and ardently 
pursued, the welfare of the kingdom which he governed, no 
one has ever questioned. But it may well be doubted whether 
any degree of apathy or negligence was ever so fatal in its re- 
sults as was his ceaseless solicitude to interfere in every thing, 
and to manage every thing. Happy would it have been for 
France if her indefatigable minister had learned, like an emi- 
nent statesman of later times, to divide his official business 
into three equal parts, of which the first was not worth the 
doing, the second did itself, and the third was quite enough 
for any man to attempt. 

Thirdly. Regarding the trade in gold and silver money, 
Colbert, adopting the opinions of his age, proclaimed and acted 
on the maxim that the wealth of a nation is to be measured, 
at any given moment, by the quantity of such coin which it 
may happen to possess. It is, I think, no less a person than 
Voltaire who extols his wisdom in thus preferring the accu- 
mulation of imperishable bullion to the exchange of it for ar- 
ticles which must, sooner or later, wear out. The less scien- 
tific merchants of his day represented to Colbert that the rigor 
with which he prevented or punished the exportation of the 
precious metals was rendering them of less value in France 
than in other countries ; and added that, if the transit of them 
were unfettered, gold would always be attracted to France 
from every part of the world in which it bore a lower value. 
The universal manager of all the affairs of the whole realm 
had the honesty to record his inability to understand the mean- 
ing of this remonstrance ; and then, assuming that it had no 
meaning, he persisted in devoting the whole influence of the 
government to the hopeful project of causing French produce 
to be exciianged in all other parts of the world for gold and 
silver in preference to every other return. Fortunately, the 
common sense of the merchants was too active for the Lapu- 
tan science of the statesman. Had it been otherwise, France 



618 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

would have acquired a vast mass of gold and silver, as useless 
in her coffers as in its native mines, at the expense of bringing 
to a close all her commercial intercourse w^ith the other nations 
of the world, to whom she would have sold every thing, but of 
whom she would have bought nothing. 

Fourthly. To promote that commercial intercourse was, 
however, the great object of the policy of Colbert. Why, he 
inquired, should not France participate in the treasures which 
England and Holland are gathering as each tide floats into 
their ports vessels from every quarter of the navigable globe ? 
The answer was at hand. The trade of France _ languished 
because it was not adequately encouraged by the French gov- 
ernment. True, indeed, royal charters had been given to three 
successive companies trading to the East. But contenting 
himself by conferring on them a corporate character, the king 
had omitted to supply them with corporate funds. Let that 
omission be remedied ; let a new French East India Company, 
be instituted, with all the aids and all the protection which 
the crown can bestow, and Havre and Bordeaux shall soon 
eclipse the mercantile splendor of Rotterdam and Bristol, So 
reasoned or so predicted Colbert ; and, at his suggestion, Louis 
XIV. granted to the new association all that royalty can grant : 
the power of making conquests — dominion over them when 
made — exclusive privileges of every known extent and variety 
— bounties on all their exports and imports — a code of laws — 
an ecclesiastical establishment — and even the right of tolera- 
ting any heathens, heretics, and infidels, with whom it might 
be convenient for them to enter into commercial relations. 
The royal heralds contributed an escutcheon crowded with 
palm and olive trees, and encircled by the legend Florebo quo- 
cunque ferar. Artists of another class circulated such delinea- 
tions of Madagascar (the seat of the projected government) as 
might best tempt a Picard or Languedocian to exchange his 
cold or his arid home for that earthly paradise. Of the re- 
quired capital of fifteen millions, Louis himself subscribed 
three. All aspirants for court favor were encouraged, if not 
required, to imitate the example. Public defaulters were al- 
lowed to liquidate their debts to the treasury by taking shares. 
Even in the great chamber of the Parliament the chancellor 
appeared as a suitor to the judges for assistance to this great 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 619 

national undertaking ; and those learned persons had to make 
their reluctant choice between a hazardous speculation and 
the displeasure of Yersailles. 

Never was a commercial speculation so dandled into life by 
nurses of such high degree, and never were such cares more 
ineffectual. Before ten years had elapsed the company had 
become irretrievably bankrupt, and the king assumed the pos- 
session and control of their establishments on the hard condi- 
tion of paying off their debts. 

Nor was this the only attempt made by Colbert to emulate 
the achievements of the Dutch and English merchants. In 
North and Central America, in the West Indies and Africa, 
and in the Levant, he assigned to three mercantile corpora- 
tions as many distinct fields in which they were to make the 
fleurs de lys the emblem of successful trade and of maritime 
greatness. Nothing was withholden from any of them which 
the crown could give — neither privileges, nor monopolies, nor 
bounties, nor exemptions, nor sovereign powers. Yet the au- 
thor of these schemes lived long enough to witness the failure 
of them all, and long enough (as it would seem) to discover 
that royal patronage was a motive-power utterly unable to 
compete with the energy of individual enterprise. 

Still it remained for Colbert to try whether the trade of 
France might not thrive on the depression, and at the expense, 
of the trade of all the neighboring states ; and that experiment 
was commenced in the year 1667, by the enactment of such 
import duties as would virtually prevent the importation of 
the cloths and other wrought goods of England and of the 
United Provinces. The new tariff was to deprive the Dutch 
of a market indispensable to some of the chief branches of 
their domestic industry ; but (so, at least, reasoned the great 
patron of commerce) it would transfer to the capitalists and 
workmen of France all the profits and all the wages which 
their neighbors had been accustomed to earn in the markets 
of that country. He fell into the common mistake of not look- 
ing at the subject in that point of view from which it would 
be regarded by his antagonists. By imposing a high discrim- 
inating duty on French wines in favor of the wines of Grer- 
many, Holland had in her hands the means of an effective re- 
taliation ; and, after four years had been consumed in unprof- 



620 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

itable diplomatic remonstrances, those reprisals were at length 
made by the States- Greneral in the winter of 1670. For thus 
imitating his own example, and for thus presuming to act on 
his own principles, Louis, at the suggestion, or at least with 
the full concurrence, of Colbert, punished the United Provinces 
by an invasion at the head of 130,000 men, under the imme- 
diate command of Conde and Turenne, of Luxembourg and 
Vauban. By terror and by corruption the gates of all the 
cities of Holland were at once thrown open at liis approach, 
and the passage of the Rhine was defended against him just 
so far as was necessary to give some deceptive color to the 
preposterous eulogies which, on the ground of that operation, 
exalted the courtly Louis to the level of the mighty Julius. 
Deputies suing for peace arrived from the terrified States at the 
camp of the invader. Their proposals were rejected with arro- 
gance and insult ; and the victorious king was not ashamed to 
require that the rulers of the Seven Provinces should annually 
transmit to him a medal surrounded by a legend, in which was 
to be made the acknowledgment that the Dutch people held 
their liberties of him and at his pleasure. The insult sunk 
deeply into their hearts. In a phrensy of popular madness, 
they massacred John and Cornelius de "Witt as faithless to their 
native land, and as partisans of their hated enemy. The gov- 
ernment passed into the hands of William, prince of Orange, 
who, after a war of six years, at length concluded with Louis, 
in August, 1678, the treaty of Nimeguen. By that treaty 
France abandoned the original ground of the quarrel. Her 
tariff of 1667 was revoked, and either country conceded to the 
other a full liberty of trade, unimpeded by the grant of any 
privileges or bounties in which the citizens of both should not 
equally participate. From this iniquitous contest, therefore, 
Colbert and his master acquired no real commercial advantage, 
nor any just military fa,me. It laid the basis of a costly and 
humiliating warfare of forty years' continuance ; but, on the 
other hand, it served as an apology for striking some ostenta- 
tious medals, for erecting some arrogant statues, and for ele- 
vating a splendid triumphal arch at the northern gates of Paris. 
Fifthly. To his other cares for the mercantile greatness of 
France, Colbert added an extreme solicitude to guide, or rath- 
er to force, the labor of her artisans into the most profitable 
channels. 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS, 621 

In the tenth and three following centuries, commercial fra- 
ternities had been formed in most of the great cities of that 
kingdom (as of the rest of Europe) for the defense of the handi- 
craftsmen against their feudal lords. When those Guilds had 
effectually repelled oppression from themselves, they began to 
practice it on others. They were the Communists of that gen- 
eration, and their history might teach a useful lesson to the 
Socialists of our own. Their tyranny was directed against all 
the private artisans who would not, or who could not, join their 
societies. In Charles V. and in Charles YI., those artisans 
sought and found defenders against the persecutions of the in- 
corporated brotherhoods. But when Louis XI. invoked the aid 
of those companies in his struggle against the seigneurs, he 
was in his turn compelled to support them in their contest with 
the independent workmen. Thenceforward their oppressions 
knew no limit. No man could lawfully carry on his trade un- 
less he became a freeman of one of their incorporations. No 
man could obtain that freedom except by the payment of ad- 
mission fees of a great but arbitrary amount. And, before any 
one could be allowed so to qualify himself, he was required to 
produce to the guild a specimen of his skill, which they should 
acknowledge to be a chef d'auvre. To many a candidate it 
was also a matter of extreme difficulty to ascertain what was 
the guild into which his particular art or craft would author- 
ize him to enter ; for those companies were exceedingly nu- 
merous, and were engaged in ceaseless and acrimonious dis- 
putes with each other as to the precise limits of their respect- 
ive functions. To determine those knotty questions, the tav- 
ern-keepers went to law with the bakers, and the fruiterers 
with the grocers ; and a protracted contest before the courts 
was necessary to determine the precise point at which the ap- 
propriate office of the shoemaker gave place to that of the cob- 
bler. It is with an admiration not unmixed with awe that 
we celebrate the venerable length of years which our own suits 
in Chancery occasionally attain, but they must be numbered 
among ephemeral litigations when brought into contrast with 
the antediluvian longevity of some of the judicial controversies 
between the commercial brotherhoods of France. Thus the 
tailors commenced in 1530 an action against the old-clothes- 
men, which expired in the year 1776, in the 246th year of its 



THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

age, though not till it had given birth (says M. Clement) to be- 
tween 20,000 and 30,000 preliminary decrees. And thus, also, 
in the year 1509, the poulterers commenced a suit against the 
rotisseurs, to determine whether, within their privilege of sell- 
ing rotis, the defendants were entitled to sell roasted game and 
poultry. The Palais de Justice decided, in 1628, that is, in 
the 120th year of the discussion, that no rotisseur might sup- 
ply the meat required at any marriage or other festival, unless 
it were celebrated under his own roof; but that within those 
domestic precincts he might sell to any customer " trois plats 
de viande bouillie, et trois de fricassee ;" a judgment which, 
though it left the main point unsettled, would have done hon- 
or to the Court of Barataria, under the presidency of that illus- 
trious judge who has rendered its decisions forever memorable. 

From the time of Louis XI. to that of Louis XIY., the gen- 
eral tendency of the legislation of the kings of France had been 
to relax the fetters by which the monopoly of the incorporated 
guilds thus impeded the industry of all other French manufac- 
turers. The only material exception occurred in the reign of 
Henry IV., who, in deference to the advice of the notables, as- 
sembled at Eouen in 1597, reversed the policy of his imme- 
diate predecessors, and restored the companies to their former 
power. But, in that assembly, the interests and the votes of 
a large number of rich merchants and master workmen pre- 
vailed over their colleagues. In the States- G-eneral of 1614, 
on the contrary, where the public opinion of the whole king- 
dom was freely expressed, these restrictions were condemned 
as an intolerable grievance. 

In Colbert, however, they found a patron of unrivaled au- 
thority and zeal. He observed that the relaxation of them 
which had been practically established had produced the effect 
of bringing into the market many manufactured articles which 
fell far below the highest attainable standard of excellence. 
But Colbert's object was to render the cloths, and tapestry, and 
glass, and silk of France more than equal, in value and in price, 
to those of England, Flanders, and Italy. To accomplish this 
design, he promulgated no less than forty-four edicts or royal 
regulations to determine how those articles should be fabri- 
cated. The general character of this singular code may be 
inferred from the following specimens : 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 623 

First. In August, 1666, an edict appeared, reciting that 
the serge-makers of Aumale had, during some years, had "an 
enthe liberty of determining, according to their own caprice," 
the length and breadth of their cloths, and that, on account 
of the consequent faults in those articles, the sale of them had 
greatly diminished. To remedy this evil, it was enacted that 
the serge-makers of the place should be formed into a trading 
company, enjoying the usual privileges for controlling all work- 
men in that business. 

Secondly. Twelve months later, Colbert promulgated an- 
other edict, reciting that the goods produced by the workers 
in gold, in silver, in silk, in wool, in thread, in dyeing and in 
bleaching, were not of the requisite quality ; and, therefore, 
laying down rules for the guidance of them all, in each of their 
various operations. These rules, in a single case, that of the 
dyers, comprised no less than 317 distinct articles. 

Thirdly. There w^as a corporation of united barbers, wig- 
makers, and bathing-house keepers. For their better conduct, 
Colbert directed that the basins hung out at their shop-win- 
dows should always be white, to distinguish them from the 
surgeons' basins, which were always to be yellow. The bar- 
bier peruquiers, and they alone, might sell hair, excepting 
(added the provident law-giver) any case in which any person 
may bring his own hair for sale to any wig-maker's shop. 

Fourthly. By another enactment, it was forbidden to any 
master workman to keep more than a single apprentice. 

Fifthly. In many trades, as, for example, in the trade of bon- 
neterie, every aspirant was to serve for five years as an appren- 
tice, and then five years more as a journeyman ; after which 
he was to produce his chef d'oeuvre. Thus, in those days, no 
one in France might sell a " bonnet," which, under correction, 
I take to be the French for any female head-dress, who had not 
studied the art during ten years, and who had not then given 
proof of perfection in it ; a perfection which (if reliance may 
be placed on circumstances not entirely unknown to some of us ) 
would seem to be regarded by the best possible judges of the 
question as not often attained, and as not easily attainable. 

But, sixthly ; from these obligations, the sons and daughters 
of master workmen were to a very great extent exempted. 

Every one' anticipates the results of these puerilities. They 



624 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

tended to confine the manufactures of France to a few privi- 
leged families. They gave rise to useless prosecutions, and to 
many oppressive and unprofitable punishments. They tended 
to confine the manufacturing business to a few privileged fam- 
ilies, and to reduce the number of competitors to the lowest 
possible amount. They excited from every quarter resentments 
and remonstrances, which again provoked still more vexatious 
edicts. One of these, of the 24th of December, 1670, ordained 
that any manufactured goods which should not be in exact 
conformity to the royal ordinances should be exhibited on a 
gibbet nine feet high, bearing the maker's name ; and that, 
after twenty-four hours, they should be cut, torn, burned, or 
confiscated. For the second offense, the manufacturer was also 
to receive a public admonition in a full meeting of his guild ; 
but for the third offense he was to be put into the stocks for 
two hours, with the fragments of his confiscated property 
hanging about him ; an edict, says Forbonnais, which one 
might suppose to have been written in Japan. M. Clement, 
with greater equity, adds that, before affiliating such a law 
on the Japanese, one ought to ascertain what kind of opinion 
they would have of it. 

After trying in vain the efficacy of penalties, Colbert resort- 
ed to the use of bounties. He gave 1200 livres to every dyer 
who conformed to his rules. He gave money to every work- 
man who, being himself in the service of such a master, should 
marry a female fellow-servant. He gave them a premium on 
the birth of their first child. He gave to every apprentice en- 
tering the trade on his own account both money and tools. 
And, in favor of some workmen whom he peculiarly cherished, 
he even gave a great reduction of their tallies. 

But the storm and the sunshine were alike ineffectual to 
ripen the fruits of the French Protectionist husbandry. The 
trades cherished by Colbert died with him. His policy was, 
however, more long-lived. The authority of his name main- 
tained till the eve of the Revolution, and even yet supports in 
France, a commercial system which all her real statesmen rep- 
robate, but in which many sections of the people find their ac- 
count. 

To what causes, it may be asked, is that authority to be re- 
ferred, since the measures of Colbert, which I have hitherto 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. G25 

noticed, were calculated neither to secure the approbation of 
the wiser few, nor the favor of the unreflecting many ? The 
answer to that inquiry is neither difficult nor doubtful. No 
man had ever studied more profoundly, or, perhaps, no man 
ever judged by a surer instinct, the character of his fellow- 
countrymen. If some of the measures which he pursued were 
ill-judged, the common motive of them all was to promote the 
welfare of the great body of the people of France. That object 
ever lay nearest to his heart. No statesman was ever actuated 
by a public spirit more genuine, or by a patriotism more ar- 
dent, even when the most ill directed ; and though Colbert has 
won this praise tardily from generations later than his own, 
yet it is a praise which, when once firmly won by any ruler 
of that enthusiastic people, secures to him for all future times 
the rank and worship of a demigod among them. The love of 
country of this great minister exhibited itself, I think, chiefly, 
first, in his unrelenting hostility to all abuses and to the au- 
thors of them ; secondly, in the splendor and utility of his pub- 
lic works ; thirdly, in his creation of a belligerent marine far 
more powerful than France had ever before seen or contem- 
plated ; fourthly, in his labors for the improvement of the laws 
and judicial system of the kingdom ; and, finally, on the pat- 
ronage which he bestowed on literature, and, therefore, on the 
literary dispensers of reputation. My limits of time will not 
allow me to touch on these topics except with great brevity, 
but I may not altogether pass them over. 

First, then, on his accession to power in 1661, Colbert de- 
clared war to the knife against the whole brood of peculators, 
defaulters, and public accountants, by instituting an extraor- 
dinary commission, or court of justice, to compel them to dis- 
gorge their ill-gotten gains ; and though some parts of his sub- 
sequent proceedings for that purpose may not bear the test 
of a very severe morality, some excuse for his rigor may be 
found, partly in the habits of the times, and partly in the enor- 
mous extravagance of the frauds with which he had undertaken 
to contend. 

The authors, or suspected authors of them, were required 
to produce and verify statements of all the property which 
they had acquired by inheritance or otherwise during the last 
preceding twenty-six years, and all the cures and vicars of 

Rr 



626 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

Paris were directed to call upon the faithful in their respective 
congregations, to denounce all offenses against the treasury of 
which they might he aware, on pain of excommunication in 
case of disobedience. The results of the proceedings of this 
tribunal were, first, to effect the restitution to the crown of one 
hundred and ten millions of livres ; secondly, to set aside the 
conveyances of many territorrial and other royal rights vfhioh 
had been alienated on no adequate consideration ; and, thirdly, 
to reduce, by eight millions, the annual charge for the public 
debt. So long as this tempest raged against the financiers alone, 
the citizens of Paris watched the progress of it with exultation ; 
but the reduction of the dividends payable at the Hotel de Yille 
spread alarm, and, for a moment seemed to threaten a revolt 
among all the wealthy inhabitants of that once rebellious city. 
With the suppression of the Fronde, however, they had ceased 
to be formidable. Their discontent expressed itself only in 
impotent murmurs, and in those dismal looks which suggested 
to Boileau his picture of a "visage plus pale qu'un rentier, 
a I'aspect d'un arret qui retranche un quartier." 

To these retributory measures Colbert added others for pre- 
venting the recurrence of similar abuses. He deprived all fiscal 
offices of their heritable character. He took from every pub- 
lic accountant securities for the faithful performance of the 
duties of his office. He exacted of every such officer an ha- 
bitual residence at his post. He reduced the per centage on 
all collections of the public revenue. He subjected the estate 
pf every debtor to the crown to a tacit mortgage for the amount 
of his debt, which was payable in preference to every other 
demand. He rendered it necessary that all taxes let to farm 
should so be disposed of by public auction, and not otherwise. 
He established a complete system of keeping and rendering ac- 
counts of the receipt and application of the public money ; and 
he devised effective forms and rules for preventing the devia- 
tion of any such money from the particular service to which 
it was properly applicable. Such labors are easily enumerated, 
and may not collectively assume in the enumeration a very 
brilliant appearance. But they were such as few other men 
would have had the diligence, the skill, and the hardihood at 
once to devise and to enforce. 

From the accountants and peculators, Colbert turned to make 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. C27 

"war on the dishonest creditors of the state. In the depths of 
his financial distresses, Mazarin had diverted to the use of 
the crown the octrois and other dues exigible in the various 
cities of France, and applicable there to various purposes of 
local necessity or convenience. To indemnify the citizens for 
the consequent prejudice to their municipal interests, the car- 
dinal, as we formerly saw, administered the singular relief of 
authorizing them to exact from themselves as much more 
money for recruiting the civic treasuries as he had taken away 
for the behoof of the national treasury. To escape the burden 
of this double taxation, the communes every where borrowed 
funds for their indispensable local expenditure. Such funds 
were, however, unavoidably taken upon an equivocal security, 
and, therefore, at a high rate of interest ; and, in consequence 
of these improvident loans, Colbert found nearly the whole of 
France threatened with a kind of municipal bankruptcy. After 
ascertaining, by a rigid inquest, what was the amount of debt 
really due, and to what extent the contracts made with the 
embarrassed citizens had been fraudulent or usurious, and after 
establishing a registry in each city of the pecuniary obligations 
to which each was justly liable, he restored to them all half 
of the funds which Mazarin had seized, leaving to them the 
collection and management of the whole of the octrois and other 
dues which they were thenceforward to divide with the crown. 
Applying themselves with new zeal to the improvement of an 
income in which they were so largely to participate, the com- 
munes ere long paid off their debts, and gave a new illustra- 
tion of the old proverbial truth, that " a half is sometimes 
greater than the whole." 

From the corporation creditors, this sleepless reformer next 
turned to the Noblesse. To escape their contribution to the 
tallies and other ordinary taxes, a vast throng of persons had 
either acquired or laid claim to the privileges of nobility. Some 
had bought this honor ; some had earned it by the discharge 
of public offices ; and many were indebted for it to their own 
impudence, or to the favor, not hardly propitiated, of the her- 
alds and genealogists, who were but too well disposed to cer- 
tify the gentle lineage of all whom they knew to be provided 
with well-lined purses. The poorer roturiers Were thus con- 
demned to see one after another of their wealthier brethren 



628 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

withdrawing tlieir shoulders from the pressure of the burden 
which weighed so heavily, because so exclusively, on their own 
class or caste of society. Indignant at their sufferings, and 
full of burning zeal for the interests of the treasury, Colbert 
attacked. this noble phalanx with characteristic decision. With 
one blow he revoked all titles to nobility which had been ac- 
quired within the last preceding thirty years. With another 
he recovered against the usurpers of noble rank penalties for 
that offense amounting collectively to two millions of livres. In 
every part of France multitudes of parvenus were driven back 
to the ranks which, they had deserted, and were compelled to re- 
sume their shares of the load which they had shaken off. In 
Provence alone, the number who thus shed their false plumage 
was 1257, all men of mark in their respective vicinities. It 
is not difficult to imagine how profound was the satisfaction 
with which all classes of society hailed this signal act of penal 
justice — how the ancient Nobles rejoiced to be delivered from 
their undignified associates — how the meaner ranks were glad- 
dened at the defeat of an arrogant pretension— and how the 
tax-payers welcomed back into their lines the fugitives who 
had left them to suffer alone. The only mourners were they 
to whom the public faith was dear ; for to them it appeared 
nothing less than a robbery to receive money for patents of no- 
bility, and then to revoke the grants on no alleged ground except 
that the money paid had been inadequate to the advantage ob- 
tained. But among the praises of Colbert's administration and 
of the age of Louis XIY., a strict integrity in public affairs 
held no place. 

In the custom-houses of France the great minister found his 
next antagonists. On his accession to power, export duties 
were payable, not only on the removal of merchandise beyond 
the limits of the kingdom, but even when they were removed 
from one province to another. Nor were the rates of those du- 
ties the same in any two provinces. Although the absurdity 
and the mischiefs of this system baffle description, they may 
be illustrated by the example of what were called the Customs 
of Valence. At that place a duty of from three to five per 
cent, ad valorem was payable, first, on all goods brought into 
Lyons from Languedoc, from Provence, from the Levant, or 
from Spain ; and, secondly, upon all goods brought from the 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. G29 

eastern provinces of France into Languedoc, Provence, or Pied- 
mont. To secure the payment of these duties, all articles sub- 
ject to them were to be brought to Valence, however great 
might be the deviation from the shorter and more convenient 
route ; and a vast cordon of revenue officers was accordingly- 
drawn, as a kind of net, round no less than nine of the princi- 
pal provinces of the kingdom. To abolish this and all other 
local tariffs, and to substitute for them one general scale of 
customs duties applicable only to the external trade of France, 
that so the intercourse between the different parts of the realm 
might be entirely free, was a scheme to which Colbert devoted 
all the energies of his mind, and all the delegated authority 
and influence of the crown. He was, however, opposed by the 
multitudes who had a vested or a prospective interest m these 
strange abuses. He was opposed also by that still greater and 
more u-rational multitude which~ found in the commercial iso- 
lation of their respective provinces food with which to nourish 
their provincial prejudices. And in many parts of the king- 
dom those prejudices found supporters, and Colbert antagonists, 
in the old provincial states which still maintained their languid 
and decaying existence. Before such adversaries he at last re- 
coiled. Some of the provinces resisted the proposed tariff al- 
together, and, so far as commerce was concerned, they were 
allowed to remain and to be described as provinces on the foot- 
ing of foreign countries. Other provinces demanded and ob- 
tained the maintenance of all their old and distinctive laws of 
customs, and they were thenceforward known as the foreign 
provinces. But about half of France acquiesced in the new 
and uniform tariff, and that part of the realm acquired the 
fiscal designation of the " five great farms." With this incom- 
plete success Colbert was obliged to be content. He had plant- 
ed the vigorous shoots of a great future improvement. Yet so 
slow was their growth, that (strange as it now sounds to us) 
the French Revolution still found the Douane de Yalence and 
the " five great farms" in full vigor, and swept them away 
among the throng of obsolete anomalies. 

But, secondly, the ambition of Colbert was of too noble a 
character to be satisfied with increasing the public revenue by 
the punishment or prevention of abuses, or by the establish- 
ment of new tariffs. He aimed to explore and open new sources 



630 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

of national wealth, and with that view became not merely the 
patron, but even the author, of some of the noblest of the pub- 
lic works of France, and especially of the great scheme, so oft- 
en meditated by others, of uniting the Mediterranean and the 
Atlantic. To Pierre Paul de Riquet is, indeed, due the praise 
of all the science which devised, and of all the energy which 
actually accomplished, the Canal of Languedoc. Without pre- 
suming to explain the mechanical contrivances by which he 
subdued the obstacles which nature seemed to have opposed 
to that undertaking, I believe I am safe in asserting that, when 
due allowance is made for the inexperience of his age, Riquet 
exhibited in that great work an extent of genius and a variety 
of resources which entitle him to a high place among the great- 
est engineers of modern times. The appropriate praise of Col- 
bert is, that he appreciated the capacity, admired the energy, 
and sustained the courage of his great agent in this scheme ; 
that he continued to hope while others desponded, and was 
unmoved by all the expostulations and ridicule by which the 
prophets of evil, and the speakers of evil, of those days would 
have an-ested the enterprise ; and that, in the midst of all 
other demands on the public treasury, he advanced from that 
source one half of the indispensable outlay. Corneille has 
celebrated the junction of the two seas in some noble verses, 
whose only fault is that they say far too much of Louis XIV., 
and nothing at all of Riquet or of Colbert. Yauban, after trav- 
ersing the whole length of the canal, and admiring the labors 
of a genius so kindred to his own, pronounced a eulogy more 
generous than that of the great dramatist : " The work (he 
said) is absolutely perfect, with one exception— -I have looked 
ill vain for a statue of Riquet." 

Thirdly. It was, however, neither as a financier nor as an 
economist that Colbert chiefly acquired the high place which 
he retains in the admiration of all Frenchmen. His higher, 
or, at least, his more effective claim to their gratitude is, that 
by him France was first elevated into the foremost rank of 
maritime powers, so far, at least, as that rank depends on the 
possession of a belligerent navy. In 1661, the date of his ac- 
cession to power, she possessed 30 ships of war, of which 3 
were of the first class, 8 of the second, and 7 of the third, the 
rest being small craft only. At the peace of Mmeguen in 1678, 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 631 

the royal navy comprised 120 ships of war, of which 12 were 
of the first class, 26 of the second, and 40 of the third. Five 
years later, the number had arisen to no less than 273 vessels 
of all classes, of which 139 were either ships of war or frigates. 
To man this vast navy, Colbert established a law, not unlike 
the maritime conscription law of France at the present day ; 
and such was its success, that in the year 1670, the number 
of seamen registered under it amounted to 30,000 ; and, afteT 
the lapse of thirteen years (that is, in 1683), to 77,852. Neither 
honors nor emoluments were spared to animate the courage of 
the force thus rapidly called into existence ; and, in his official 
intercourse with his naval commanders, Colbert relaxed his 
habitual austerity, and cheerfully indulged them in the rough- 
ness of manners and petulance of temper for which their em- 
ployment afforded at once the temptation and the apology. 

His zeal for this branch of the public service showed itself 
in other and yet more laborious cares. He employed lawyers 
of great eminence to compile a code of laws for the government 
of the French navy ; and the Ordonnance sur la Marine, which 
he at length promulgated, rapidly acquired that universal ad- 
miration which has ever since followed it. The praise of this 
great work must, of course, be divided between Colbert and 
the subordinate agents whom he employed in the execution of 
it; and, for the same reason, I hesitate to subscribe to the 
eulogies which he has so largely received as the author of the 
other codes of law which were promulgated during his admin- 
istration. On his accession to power, some of the provinces of 
France were governed by ancient customs or traditions. Some 
of them lived under the droit ecrit, or ancient laws of Rome. 
In some, the provincial jurisprudence was the result of a fusion 
of the corpus juris civilis and of customs borrowed from many 
different localities ; and in all, the rule for the observance of 
the people in their transactions with each other, and for the 
guidance of the judges in their decisions, was, to a great ex- 
tent, doubtful and indeterminate. To reduce this chaos into 
order, Colbert employed Lamoignon, and others of the greatest 
jurists of his times ; and in the years 1667, 1669, 1670, and 
1673, appeared four codes, the result of their labors, and, as 
it is said, of Colbert's superintendence and revision of them. 
They were known as the Ordonnance pour la Reformation de 



632 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

la Justice Civile — as the Reglement general pour les Eaux et 
Forets — as the Ordonnance Criminelle — and as the Ordonnance 
de Commerce. During one hundred and thirty years, and un- 
til superseded by the Code Napoleon, they formed the basis of 
the law of France, both civil and penal. But as the name of 
Justinian was superscribed to the work of Tribonian and his 
fellow-laborers, and as the name of Napoleon has been given 
to the compilation of Cambaceres and his colleagues, so has 
the name of Louis XIV. been attached to that of Colbert, of 
Lamoignon, and his associates ; for in civil, as in military life, 
the laurel is habitually assigned to the leader under whose 
auspices the victory has been won, rather than to the subor- 
dinates by whose toil, and ability, and self-sacrifice it may 
have been really gained ; and, in this distribution of fame, 
there is sometimes more substantial equity, and always more 
public convenience, than might be supposed by those who 
never, either as leaders or as subordinates, wielded either sword 
or pen in such a controversy. 

Finally. No man ever understood, better than Colbert, the 
importance of the suffrages of those by whom the pen is so 
wielded as an instrument of dominion over mankind. To 
many of them he granted pensions ; and in the list of his pen- 
sioners, amid many heroes of the French Dunciad, occur the 
names of Pierre Corneille, with his description as " le premier 
poete dramatique du monde ;" of Moliere, "excellent poete 
comique ;" of the Sieur Racine, " poete Fran^ais ;" and of Le 
Sieur Mezerai, " historiographe." The favor of many foreign 
writers was wooed in the same persuasive manner ; but among 
them I see no Englishman, nor any name more eminent than 
those of Huygens and Isaac Yossius. To take other securities 
for the permanency of his own reputation, Colbert established 
the Academies of Sciences, of Painting, and of Inscriptions. 
The last of these was so called, because its peculiar office was 
that of devising inscriptions in honor of the great King of 
France, and in celebration of his triumphs, military and civil. 
As far as Louis himself is concerned, however, no great grati- 
tude was due to this company of eulogists ; for, among many 
other extravagances, he was indebted to them for his famous 
device of the sun rising over the world, with the legend, " Nee 
pluribus impar ;" a boast, perhaps, as ambiguous in its mean- 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 633 

ing as it was arrogant in its appearance and offensive in its 
effect. The interpretation of it by Louis himself, in his in- 
structions to the Dauphin, is, I suppose, the right one. It is 
that, adequate as he had proved himself to be to the conduct 
of so many great affairs, he would not have been inadequate 
to the government of.many other of the kingdoms of the earth, 
if they, like France, had been brought, or should be brought, 
within the radiance of his solar beams. If such be, indeed, 
the sense which the authors of this metallurgic hyperbole in- 
tended it to convey, it was as unjust as it was extravagant ; 
for, beyond all dispute, the boasted sufficiency to such and so 
many great undertakings belonged, not to Louis himself, but 
to his great minister, Colbert. In some of these he had greatly 
erred. But in all of them, by turns, he had exhibited a range 
of knowledge, an energy of application, a contempt for diffi- 
culty and for danger, and a zeal for the glory, the greatness, 
and the welfare of his country, which entitles him to an emi- 
nent place among the most illustrious statesmen who have im- 
pressed an indelible trace of their lives and labors on the his-" 
tory of mankind. 

To Colbert, however, no such honor was rendered, either by 
the king whom he had so well served, or by the people for 
whom he had so diligently labored. Louis had long been over- 
awed by the genius of his great minister. The forms of sub- 
mission and deference had, indeed, been as studiously main- 
tained by the subordinate as they had been rigidly exacted by 
the superior. The austere and frugal controller general had 
even indicted eulogies on the Grand Monarque, and had pro- 
jected costly monumental works in honor of his conquests. 
The homage was coldly received, wliile the substantial power, 
which it was intended to conceal, was suspiciously resented. 
With the peace of Niraeguen, Louis had regained his insatia- 
ble passion for buildings and other selfish expenditure ; and as 
Yersailles, Trianon, Marly, the gigantic aqueduct of Mainte- 
non, and the edifices of the Place Vendome, one after another 
drained the resources which Colbert had accumulated, his 
scruples and remonstrances became a continual rebuke and a 
serious obstacle to the extravagance of his master. AVith his 
pride wounded and his temper irritated, the king at length in- 
flicted on the aged statesman some of those indignities which, 



634 THE ABSOLUTE JMONARCHY UNDER 

when coming from him, withered the very souls of those who 
worshiped at that idolatrous court. Already worn out by la- 
bor and disease, the heart-broken old man sickened and died ; 
and when the last letter he was ever to receive from Louis 
reached him, he refused to r«ad it, exclaiming in the bitterness 
of his soul, in words like those of Wolsey,- " If I had but served 
my G-od as faithfully as I have served this man, I should long 
since have worked out my salvation. But now what awaits 
me !" 

Nor were the people of France more grateful than their sov- 
ereign to their a^ed servant. His death was hailed at Paris 
by a perfect storm of satirical epigrams, and to rescue his body 
from the anticipated outrages of the Parisians, it was conveyed 
by night from his hotel to the place of interment under a strong 
military escort. 

The catastrophe is not without its moral. If, among those 
whom I address, there be any who are proposing to devote all 
the powers of theu' souls and bodies to the service of the state, 
but who may not hope either to command her armies in the 
field or to lead her parties in the senate, let them not shrmk 
from that most severe and thankless service, but let them learn 
betimes to look to the approbation of G-od and of their own 
consciences as their only reward. If they should bring all the 
energies and all the virtues of Colbert to their appointed offices, 
they will assuredly find a Louis XIV. to appropriate to himself 
the glory of their labors, and an ignorant multitude to exact 
from them the expiation of his incapacity, and faults, and 
blunders. 

At the death of Colbert it became necessary to reconstitute 
the administration of which he had been the real, though the 
unavowed head, and especially to replace him in the oflice of 
controller general by a successor who would at once have skill 
to replenish the treasury, and meekness to acquiesce in the im- 
provident exhaustion of it. But it was above all things essen- 
tialthat the choice should appear to Louis to be liis own un- 
prompted and spontaneous act. It deserves to be told how he 
was beguiled into that belief. 

~ "^Yhat tliink you," said he to the Chancellor le Tellier, "of 
Le Pelletier as my new minister of finance?" " Su*e," an- 
swered the sagacious lawyer, "that is a subject on which I 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 635 

have no claim to your coniidence. He is the son of my guard- 
ian, and I have, therefore, always regarded him as my own 
child." " No matter," replied the king, " tell me what is your 
opinion of him." " My opinion then is, sire, that he is up- 
right, honorable, and industrious ; but he is unfit to be a min- 
ister of finance ; he is not severe enough." "What," rejoin- 
ed Louis, " do you suppose I wish that any of my servants 
should be severe to my subjects. Since he is faithful and dil- 
igent, I appoint him to be my controller general." 

The king believed the decision to be his own, and was will- 
fully blind to the motives which had induced the chancellor so 
skillfully to draw him into it. The choice of Le Pelletier vir- 
tually placed the whole government in the hands of Le Tellier 
himself, and of his son Louvois, the minister secretary of state 
for war ; for they, when supported by the new controller gen- 
eral, formed not merely a numerical, but a most effective ma- 
jority of the new administration. Their colleagues, Seignelay 
and Colbert de Croissy, were neither of them gifted with the 
talents by which nations are governed, and absolute monarchs 
held in an unconscious bondage. Louvois possessed both of 
these talents in an eminent degree. 

He had not completed his fourteenth year Avhen he received 
from Louis a grant of the reversion of the office of secretary of 
state for war, to take effect on the death of his father Le Tel- 
lier ; and it was the boast of the king that he had himself, by 
his own example and instructions, formed the young minister 
for the duties of his place. If so, he might well be proud of 
his success, for it is the universal consent of all the most com- 
petent judges that Louvois was a perfect model of an admin- 
istrator of the department of war. His method, his compre- 
hensiveness, his foresight, his force of will, and his almost pre- 
ternatural activity, molded the belligerent force under his 
orders into an instrument so flexible for all the purposes of 
aggressive warfare, and so terrible to those against whom it 
was directed, that Louis was far more indebted to his minis- 
ter than even to his generals for the military triumphs which 
embellished his reign, and for the conquests by which liis 
dominions were extended. So eminent, mdeed, were his mer- 
its, and so universally acknowledged, even in his own lifetime, 
that, even in the jealous court of Versailles, they were cele- 



636 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

brated in the highest terms by the most devout of the wor- 
shipers of the great king. Thus Madame de Sevigne, in a let- 
ter written on the 5th of August, 1676, says of the siege of 
Aire, " M. Louvois carries off all the honors. His authority is 
absolute, and he commands the armies to advance and retreat 
at his pleasure." His pretensions were not, however, undis- 
puted. Turenne, in his great campaign of 1674-5, had the 
courage to act in direct and systematic disobedience of his or- 
ders, and Luxembourg could not live at peace with him. In- 
deed, if Madame de Sevigne be right, Louvois was the Haman 
of Racine's Esther, and either Turenne or Luxembourg the 
Mardochee. 

Well had it been for the fair fame of Turenne if he had as 
inflexibly refused to do homage to this Haman when he re- 
ceived his commands to lay waste the Palatinate. It is a far 
darker stain on the memory of that great captain than even 
his traitorous adhesion to the foreign enemies of his country 
during the wars of the Fronde. But the return of Louvois to 
the same atrocious system of making war in 1689, in defiance 
of the indignant protestations of the whole civilized world, is 
a stain far deeper still, not only on himself, but on his mas- 
ter, and even on his nation. For such guilt no administrative 
genius can make any atonement, nor any success afford the 
slightest apology. It is one of those crimes, the recollection 
of which must ever, in the judgment of all impartial men, de- 
press Louis and his minister from the level of the chiefs of the 
civilized world to a rank far below that of the most ferocious 
and pitiless of the rude barbarians by whom the Roman em- 
pire was devastated. But it forms no unmeet preparation for 
the one great measure of domestic policy which illustrated the 
years during which Louvois was the real, though the unac- 
knowledged head of the civil government of France. 

Religion, as inculcated on Louis XIV. by his confessors, is 
said by M. de Sismondi to have been reducible to two precepts, 
" Desist from adultery ; exterminate heresy." If the king fell 
short in the first of those duties, he wrought works of super- 
erogation in the second. Yet he did not commence his holy 
war with the sword. 

One third of all the profits of all the vacant benefices of 
France was set apart by Louis as the capital of a sort of Bank 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 637 

of Conversion, at the head of which he placed Pelisson, him- 
self a convert from the faith of Geneva, Under Pelisson were 
employed subordinate officers in all the cities and provinces of 
France in which Protestantism most abounded. Their duty 
was to purchase adhesions to the Church of Rome. For this 
traffic there was a regular scale of prices, ranging from five to 
one hundred livres, according to the estimated value of each 
man's apostasy — an enormous price, indeed, if regard be had 
to the value of the commodity bought and sold ; for, at half 
the money, the rogues and vagabonds of France might, as it 
should seem, have broken this royal Bank of Faith in a month,- 
and kept the Catholic benefices indefinitely vacant. Yet ga- 
zette after gazette published lists of many hundreds of Pelis- 
son's miraculous conversions ; and if the union of folly, fraud, 
and impudence, in the highest possible degree, be any depart- 
ure from the established laws of nature, the term w^as not ill 
bestowed. Such was the religion of him, dissent from whom 
was about to be followed by the most disgusting, if not the most 
terrible of all the persecutions with which the Christian world 
has been visited ! 

Pelisson's converts, as he himself says of them, desired to be 
moistened liberally by the rich dews which it was his genial 
office to distill. Many of them, therefore, devised the obvious 
scheme of a relapse, a reconversion, and a new sale of their 
souls to the royal purchaser. He answered them, however, 
not by more livres, but by an edict of the year 1679, which 
condemned all relapsed persons to banishment for life, and con- 
fisoation of all their property. The blow, as we shall here- 
after see, reached much farther than to the knaves at whom 
it was aimed. 

It was in the preceding year that the peace of Nimeguen 
brought the greatness of Louis to its apogee. Supreme over 
his own subjects and over all the powers of Europe, it remain- 
ed for him to accomplish the strange law or destiny of his race, 
by submitting his mind to a tlu-aldom from which he should 
never again be either able or willing to emancipate himself. 
The chains so indissoluble, because they were at once so soft 
and so well concealed, were grasped by the too famous Ma- 
dame de Maintenon. 

During the first sixteen years of her life she had adhered to 



638 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

tlie religious creed or society of lier great-grandfather, Agrippa 
.d'Aubigne, one of the most eminent of the champions and his- 
torians of the Huguenots. Even after her elevation, Louis (as 
we learn from her own letters) would occasionally upbraid her 
with too fond a remembrance of the heresy of her youth ; but 
ambition, which (as she also informs us) was the master-spirit 
of her life, rendered her triumphant over all such domestic as- 
sociations and early remembrances. She even exaggerated, in 
her own person, the bigotry of her royal patron, and became the 
willing accomplice of Pere la Chaise in provoking him to en- 
gage in the great crusade of the seventeenth century. 

In that servile court, obediencato the presiding demigod was 
not merely a law, but a passion. To win his smile by making 
proselytes became the daily labor of all the sycophants who 
thronged it. At each levee, dukes, and peers, and bishops, 
and generals laid before him their lists of new converts. 'No 
post reached Yersailles without intelligence of some Protestant 
church having been demolished, or of the dispersion of some 
Protestant assembly. If, with such grateful tidings, there also 
came the news of riots, outrages, and conflagrations, of which 
the heretics had been the victims, the sovereign, jealous as he 
was of his power, regarded with seeming indifference, and with 
at least supposed favor, such violations of the laws of which he 
was the guardian. 

For the law was, even yet, on the side of the Dissenters. 
The Edict of Nantes still remained on the statute-book of 
France. During fourscore years and upward, 2,000,000 of 
Frenchmen had regarded it as the charter of their civil and 
religious liberties ; and of the rest, many respected it as the 
corner-stone of the peace and union of the kingdom. The 
great founder of the Bourbon dynasty had consecrated it as the 
very ark of the Constitution, purchased with the toils, the sac- 
rifices, and the bloodshed of his glorious life. It was the one 
royal ordinance to which the people of the realm had learned 
to look with enthusiasm, as an immortal trophy of the valor 
and wisdom of their ancestors. Even, the triumphant Louis, 
therefore, paused before laying his hand upon such a monu- 
ment. He could not at once subvert it, but he could, by new 
legislation, render it ineffectual. 

In the succeeding century the statute-book of our own coun- 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 639 

try also was to be disgraced by a penal code against the Ro- 
man Catholics, It was, indeed, prompted by the too well- 
founded fears of our ancestors for the Protestant succession and 
for the civil liberties of England. It was, I admit, to a con- 
siderable extent, a menace only ; as to the last, it remained 
dormant in many of its worst enactments. But, whatever 
may be the worth of these or of any similar apologies, that 
penal code was a great crime, and has been righteously and 
signally punished. When, however, the adherents of the 
Church of Rome denounce that or any other form of religious 
persecution as unexampled, one is constrained to ask whether 
there be really any limits to human credulity in the accept- 
ance of fiction, or of human incredulity in the rejection of 
truth? There are, we know, those who regard the story of 
Julius Caesar as a myth. Some allow no existence to Moham- 
med, except as the ideal hero of an Arabian tale. Dr. Whate- 
ly, as we are all aware, has gone far to annihilate the faith of 
mankind in the life and adventures of Napoleon Bonaparte. 
But what are these historical discoveries in comparison with 
that which requires us to disbelieve the surpassing pre-emi- 
nence of the Church of Rome, in every country and in every 
age, in the mysteries of tormenting heretics in mind, body, and 
estate ! We must be more mythical than Strauss, more skep- 
tical than "Whately, if we do not recognize in her the great 
original, of whom all other persecutors have ever been but 
timid, feeble, and most imperfect imitators. Thus, for ex- 
ample, the penal code which grew up amid the agonies and 
alarms of our revolution of 1688, was nothing else than a faint 
copy of the edicts which, in the profound tranquillity of the 
peace of Nimeguen, were promulgated by Louis XIV., with 
the aid, and by the advice, of some of the greatest statesmen, 
lawyers, and divines whom the Catholic Church of France 
could boast, &% the very climax of the literary and ecclesias- 
tical glory of that kingdom. 

It provided that no Protestant might hold any public office, 
political or municipal, or engage in any liberal profession. 
No Protestant woman might discharge the office of midwife. 
No mixed marriages might be contracted. By one provision, 
all Protestants were forbidden to employ Catholic valets, lest 
the valet sfeould be seduced into heresy. By another they were 



640 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

forbidden to employ Protestant valets, because sucli persons 
could not be trusted in such, a service. No Protestant could 
be the tutor or guardian of a child, hov^ever nearly related to 
him. All bastards, of v\^hatever age, must be brought up or 
instructed in the Catholic faith. Any child of the age of sev- 
en years might abjure the Protestant religion, and the parent 
opposing any such abjuration was to incur the most severe 
penalties. Converts to the Church, of Rome were to enjoy an 
immunity during three years from all the demands of their 
creditors, and during two years from all failles and quarter- 
ings of troops ; while the treasury was to be indemnified for 
the loss by doubling those charges upon the contumacious. 
All the property of all Protestant churches beyond the permit- 
ted limits, and such, of their property within those limits as 
was devoted to the maintenance of their poor, was transferred 
to the Catholic hospitals. No legacy could be bequeathed for 
the benefit of any consistory. All physicians were required to 
report the state of their Protestant patients to the magistrates, 
that domiciliary visits might be made, to obtain, if possible, 
their abjuration. No sick Protestant might be relieved or at- 
tended in any private houses, but, if they had not houses of 
their own, were to be conveyed to hospitals under the care of 
Catholic physicians and divines. And, finally, if any new con- 
vert should be admitted into any Protestant congregation, the 
pastor was to be punished by banishment and confiscation of 
his goods, the people by the final dispersion of their assembly. 

I will not undertake to say that our own Parliament may 
not afterward have invented some improvements even on this 
iniquitous series of enactments. They were but too apt pu- 
pils in the wicked acts of their Catholic models. But from the 
very lips of those who gave them the example, the reproach 
of having followed it is as preposterous as, unhappily, it is just. 
Bacchanals are not the most appropriate censors of drunken- 
ness, nor do rebukes for impurity come with the happiest ef- 
fect from the priesthood of Aphrodite. 

But Louis and his counselors, lay and ecclesiastical, were 
soon to advance far beyond the reach of any Protestant imita- 
tion. The most powerful of those counselors, after the death 
of Colbert, were, as we have seen, the Chancellor le Tellier 
and the Marquis de Louvois, his son ; to whom must be added 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 641 

Madame de Maintenon and Pere la Chaise. Le Tellier was, 
at this time, far advanced in life, and cherished, as he was 
himself accustomed to say, hut one last wish. It was, that 
he might live long enough to affix the great seal of France to 
a royal ordinance for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 
Louvois contemplated the compulsory union of all Frenchmen 
in the same forms of worship, and in the avowal, at least, of 
the same faith, in the light in which he contemplated every 
other suhjeot. Whenever the impending war with the Prot- 
estant powers should he actually declared, such a union would, 
as he helieved, at once deprive them of a formidahle alliance 
within the kingdom, and increase the force and number of the 
arms by which they might be either resisted or assailed abroad. 
To govern the heart of Louis, and therefore to adopt all the 
maxims by which his confessor governed his conscience, were 
the very laws of the existence of Madame de Maintenon. Those 
maxims, as inculcated by La Chaise, might be summed up in 
the doctrine, that to promote the dominion of the Church of 
Rome is the one end for which existence has been given to 
kings, to ministers, to favorites, and to confessors, and to every 
one within the reach of their authority. 

The conduct of all aifairs relating to the Protestants fell, at 
that time, within the department of Chateauneuf de la Yrilli- 
ere, one of the four secretaries of state, a man of feeble char- 
acter, who readily acquiesced in the usurpation by Louvois of 
some of the most important functions of his office. In April, 
1684, the king, on Louvois's advice, promulgated one of those 
ordinances to which I have already referred. It was the law 
exempting all converts from the duty of quartering the king's 
troops during the two years next immediately after their con- 
version. The effect of this enactment was to transfer from 
La Vrilliere to Louvois as minister, or secretary of state, for 
war, the entire management of all the relations between the 
crown and the heretics of France ; for, as the troops withdrawn 
from the houses of the converts were to be domiciled in those 
of the contumacious, Louvois, and the officers acting under 
him, became at once the universal and absolute judges of such 
contumacy, and the punishers of it without appeal. He intro- 
duced into the French language a new word, and added to the 
miseries of the persecuted a new torment. Diocletian might 

Ss 



642 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

have envied the ingenuity by which the most Christian king 
invented the Di'agonnades for the punishment of erring Chris- 
tians. 

" Louvois," says lEadame de Caylus, "finding the kingdom 
at peace, and fearmg that his colleagues in office would eclipse 
his own importance, was determined, at whatever cost, to em- 
ploy the sword in a transaction which ought to have been con- 
ducted by charity and gentleness alone." In 1685, a French 
army had hastily been drawn together, by an unfounded alarm, 
to the Spanish frontier, and were then marched into the south- 
ern provinces of France as missionaries of the faith of Rome. 
We have still the instructions of Louvois to the Marquis de 
Boufflers, their commandant, to quarter them on the Protest- 
ants, and to retain them at each house where they might be so 
lodged until the inhabitants of it should be converted, and then 
to transfer them for the same purpose to another. " The king," 
wrote Louvois shortly afterward to another of his officers, " de- 
sires that they who will not adopt his religion should suffer the 
most extreme rigors, and that such of them as may have the 
stupid ambition of being the last to yield, should be urged to 
the last extremities." 

What, then, were the methods by which these new mission- 
aries labored to enlarge the borders of their Church ? He who 
would possess such knowledge must purchase it at a heavy 
price. He must read Elie Benoit, and the other Huguenot 
martyrologists of those times, and learn from them what are 
the woes, and what the degradations, into which fanaticism can 
plunge the inhabitants of this fair world. Or he may consult 
the yet surviving witnesses of the last European war, who still 
whisper things, the publicity of which mankind would not en- 
dure, about the habits of a brutal soldiery, when let loose to 
satiate their evil passions among a conquered and helpless pop- 
ulation. To the Protestant subjects of Louis XIV. that mys- 
tery of iniquity was revealed by those whom he sent among 
them in the holiest of all names, and, avowedly at least, for 
■the most sacred of all purposes. A single passage from Benoit 
may suggest some of the disclosures which it does not actually 
iuake. 

" The dragoons," he says, "fixed crosses to their musquet- 
oons, so as the more readily to compel their hosts to kiss them ; 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 643 

and if tlie kiss was not given, tliey drove the crosses against 
their stomachs or their faces. They had as little mercy for the 
children as for the adult, heating them with those crosses, or 
with the flat sides of their swords, so violently as not seldom 
to maim them. The wretches subjected the women also to 
their barbarities ; they whipped them ; they disfigured them ; 
they dragged them by the hair through the mud or along the 
stones. Sometimes they would seize the laborers on the high- 
ways, or when following their carts, and drive them to the 
Catholic churches, pricking them like oxen with their own 
goads to quicken their pace thither." 

If the missionaries themselves may be believed, never was 
any Christian mission so successful. In one of his reports to 
his father the chancellor, Louvois informed him that in a few 
weeks 20,000 conversions had been effected in the G-eneralite 
of Montauban, and 60,000 in that of Bordeaux, where such 
(he said) was the rapidity of the process, that, though so lately 
as the last month there had been 150,000 Protestants dwelling 
in that district, there would soon not be as many as 10,000. 
The Due de Noailles, commanding the army on the southeast, 
wrote to Louvois as follows : " The day after my arrival at 
Msmes, the most considerable persons of the place made their 
abjuration. The ardor for change then cooled a little ; but, in 
consequence of my having quartered some troops upon some 
of the most obstinate, affairs are once more in a good train." 
"I hope that, before the end of the month, not a sin- 
gle Huguenot will be left in the Cevennes." . . . . " The 
number of these religionists in this province is about 240,000. 
I find that I have demanded more time than enough in asking 
you to allow me to the 25th of next month for the conversion 
of them all. I now think that the whole business will be fin- 
ished before the end of this month." 

Nor were these unmixed falsehoods. There was no small 
infusion of truth in the most exaggerated of the reports of 
Louvois and his officers. The spirit of martyrdom slumbered 
at that moment among the Protestants, or w^as tried by a test 
too sore for our frail humanity. It can, indeed, never be known 
whether even Polycarp or Ignatius would have borne up against 
the Dragonnades as firmly as they submitted themselves to the 
lions. Worried, disgusted, and exasperated beyond endurance, 



644 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

by a plague more loathsome than any which visited Pharaoh, 
multitudes of the Huguenots subscribed their names, or their 
marks, to lists laid before them by their tormentors, that they 
might so gain time and opportunity for flight from their native 
land. But for such emigrants the new code had set some of 
its most subtle springes. If any one who had subscribed the 
roll of the converted was found attempting an escape from 
France, he was punished with the galleys as an emigrating 
Protestant. If he stayed at home adhering to his religion, he 
was punished with the same severity as a relapsed Catholic. 
To have hedged up his opponents in this inextricable dilemma 
is the ground on which Pere la Chaise has been extolled by 
one of his eulogists as a bright model of legislative wisdom. 

Whether such praise was due to him or not, there can be 
no doubt that both he and his royal penitent received with 
delight the accounts of the success of their Propaganda. It 
seemed to them, to Le Tellier, to Louvois, and to Madame de 
Maintenon, to have levelled all the difficulties which had hith- 
erto forbidden the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. If, they 
asked, there was really but one religion in France de facto^ 
why should there any longer be more than one de jure ? The 
sagacity of Madame de Maintenon, aided by her old Huguenot 
habits and remembrances, was indeed proof against these illu- 
sions. She well knew that the faith of her ancestors was in- 
domitable, even by the Dragonnades of her husband ; but with 
her cold and characteristic shrewdness she remarked, " The 
parents may. be hypocrites, but the children will grow up to 
be good Catholics." 

Yet, while the fatal decision was still in suspense, the Prot- 
estants omitted no practicable effort for their own deliverance. 
Many and pathetic were their appeals to the whole Christian 
commonwealth, and of these none were more eloquent than 
that of their great pastor Jurieu. But the custom-house offi- 
cers of France were able to prevent the introduction there of a 
remonstrance which all the doctors of France would have been 
unable to answer. To Louis himself his persecuted subjects 
addressed pictures of their distress, and petitions for relief, to 
which no human heart, unless rendered callous by bigotry, 
could have been insensible. But borrowing, as it is said, the 
language of Francis I., he told their deputies that, to restore 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 645 

unity of religion to his people, he would willingly employ one 
of his hands to chop off the other. Despau* then dictated hold- 
er courses ; and the Protestants of Languedoc, of the Ceven- 
nes, of Vivarais, and of Dauphine met to worship puhlicly in 
defiance of the law, that they might refute, by their numbers, 
the statements of their persecutors as to the multitude of the 
pretended abjurations. They came together, not with swords, 
but with Bibles in their hands ; and, by the order of Louvois, 
hundreds of them were slaughtered either by his soldiers or by 
the public executioners. 

At length, on the 18th of October, 1685, one of the darkest 
days in the dark annals of France, Louis XIV. signed the or- 
dinance which revoked the Edict of Nantes. Those words 
might seem to imply that he merely abrogated that great char- 
ter of his illustrious ancestor. But the terms of his ordinance 
went much farther than this, and merit peculiar attention. 

" Observing (so runs the preamble), with the gratitude which 
we so justly owe to G-od, that our cares have produced their 
desired result, since the better and the larger part of those who 
professed the religion calling itself Reformed have embraced 
the Catholic faith, for which reason the farther execution of 
the Edict of Nantes is useless," therefore the royal legislator 
proceeded to enact, in substance, as follows : The public cele- 
bration of the Protestant worship was no longer to be permit- 
ted in any part of his kingdom. All Protestant pastors were 
to quit Prance within fifteen days, and were to incur the pun- 
ishment of the galleys for life if they should again officiate in 
that capacity. But any pastor who should conform to the 
Catholic Church was to receive a pension exceeding by one 
third his actual stipend, with a reversion of half of that pen-r 
sion to his widow, and was to be at liberty to practice as an 
advocate, should such be his wish, without the usual academ- 
ical studies. Every parent was required to send his children 
to the Catholic churches, and was forbidden to educate them 
as Protestants. All emigrants were to return to France within 
four months, or were to be subjected to the confiscation of all 
their property. The galleys for life in the case of men, and 
imprisonment for life in the case of women, were to be the 
penalties of an attempt to emigrate. To this catalogue of de- 
nunciations was added what, in appearance at least, was a 



646 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

just and humane indulgence. " The memhers of this relig- 
ion," said the ordinance, " may continue to inhahit the cities 
and other parts of our realm until it shall please G-od to en- 
lighten them, without being molested on account of their re- 
ligion, so long as they do not engage in the public exercise 
of it." 

It was with a kind of melancholy fitness that this persecut- 
ing edict was thus prefaced with a false apology, and closed 
by a faithless promise. It was false that the better and larger 
part of the Protestants had embraced the Catholic faith; it was 
a mere illusion and a snare to promise that the rights of con- 
science should be respected so long as the Huguenots did not 
worship publicly. 

The resentment with which the heart rises against the royal 
author of so much guilt and misery is, however, almost si- 
lenced by the remembrance of the character of the court, and 
the spirit of the times in which he lived. Hymned and dei- 
fied, even in his crimes and follies, by such a chorus as that 
which daily greeted him with the incense of their flattery, how 
should a poor mortal man escape the intoxication, or think of 
himself as less than the Grod they made him ? for they were no 
vulgar lips or pens which extolled his revocation of the Edict 
of Nantes as among the greatest achievements of his life. 

It may have been little that such was the strain of the la- 
dies of his court ; that Madame de Maintenon declared that 
the act "would cover him with glory before G-od and men;" 
and Madame de Sevigne, that " there never had been, nor could 
be, any other ordinance so magnificent, or any act of any other 
king so glorious as this." It was, perhaps, something more 
that the aged Le Tellier sang the Nunc dimittis of Simeon as, 
on the 18th of October, he attached the great seal of France 
to the ordinance, and actually died twelve days afterward. 
But Louis had higher suffi-ages than these. His admirable 
grandson, the Duo de Bourgogne, anticipated "the astonish- 
ment with which all Europe would regard the extinction by a 
single edict of a heresy with which six preceding kings had 
contended in vain." The great Arnauld, while describing the 
measure as " a little too violent," declared that " he did not 
think it unjust." The still greater Bossuet, and the eloquent 
Flechier, called on their congregations to lift up their voices 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 647 

in loud thanksgiving for tliis blessing to the Church. And the 
G-allican Church herself, as represented by her synod of May, 
1685, that is, while the Dragonnades were yet in progress, had 
the intrepidity to assure the king that, " without violence and 
without arms," he had induced all reasonable people to aban- 
don heresy, and had " reclaimed the wanderers who, perhaps, 
would never have returned to the bosom of the Church except 
by the road strewn with flowers which he had opened for 
them." The offense, therefore, was not that of Louis alone, 
nor did he alone sustain the punishment. 

The edict of revocation was executed with inflexible rigor. 
The pastors, and among them the celebrated Claude, were 
driven into immediate exile. Vast crowds of fugitives, with 
more or less success, attempted to follow. Some bribed the 
guard stationed along the frontier. Some forced for themselves 
a passage with the sword. Delicate and aged women, says 
Benoit, might be seen crawling many weary leagues in the 
hope of escaping at once from their persecutors and from their 
country. Some of the younger, he adds (not, perhaps, with- 
out the involuntary smile which will occasionally light up the 
French countenance in its deepest gloom), disguised them- 
selves by spoiling their complexions, by producing artificial 
wrinkles, and by pretending to be dumb. Few ships quitted 
the coast without carrying away fugitives stowed and hidden 
amid the cargo. Many put to sea in open boats. The high- 
ways were thronged with Protestants yoked by chains to the 
most desperate criminals. G-entlemen who had, till then, lived 
in aflluence and in honor, crowded the galleys of Marseilles, 
and women of every rank and condition of life filled, as pris- 
oners, the convents and the jails of France. The Reign of 
Terror, which was to deform the close of the succeeding cen- 
tury, was not more formidable or more extensive. 

After the lapse of tliirty eventful years from the revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes, Louis was an infirm and an aged man. 
He had survived his children and grandchildren. He had 
been humbled by the victories of Eugene and Marlborough. 
He was overwhelmed with debt. He was hated by the people 
who had so long idolized him, and was compelled to listen to 
the indignant invectives which the whole civilized world poured 
forth against his blind and inhuman persecutions. Yet in 



648 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 

March, 1715, and within five months of his death, he published 
another ordinance, declaring that every man who had continued 
to reside in France after the ordinance of 1685 had given con- 
clusive proof that he was a Catholic, because, if not a Cath- 
olic, he would not have been permitted to dwell there. It was 
therefore enacted that every one who had avowed his purpose 
to persist in the Protestant religion should be regarded as a re- 
lapsed heretia, and punished accordingly. To quit France as a 
Protestant had been declared, by the law of 1685, a crime pun- 
ishable by the galleys for life. Not to have quitted France 
was declared, by the law of 1715, conclusive proof of a volun- 
tary continuance there as a Catholic. The code of persecution 
was again erected on flagrant absurdity and falsehood — ^the 
most fitting and convenient foundation for all such codes. And 
then the long career of him in whose name and by whose sanc- 
tion it had been promulgated reached its close. He died, de- 
claring to the Cardinals Rohan and Bissy, and to his confessor, 
the Jesuit Le Tellier, that, being himself altogether ignorant 
of ecclesiastical questions, he had acted under their guidance 
and as their agent in all that he had done against either the 
Jansenists or the Protestant heretics, and on those, his spiritual 
advisers, he devolved the responsibility to the Supreme Judge. 

We may well believe, as we most devoutly hope, that the 
decrees of that dread tribunal are often more lenient, as they 
are always more just, than the sentences which erring man 
pronounces on his fellows. And yet, however deeply conscious 
of our liability to such error, we may not, on that account, 
shrink from the unwelcome duty of echoing the indignant re- 
proaches which have been cast on the name of Louis the Per- 
secutor by every generation which has been born into the world 
since his departure from it. Even though the posthumous in- 
famy of such oppressors may be insufficient entirely to prevent 
the renewal of such oppressions, it is not altogether ineffectual ; 
and History would abdicate one of her highest privileges and 
most sacred duties if, in a faint distrust of her own influence, 
she hesitated, calmly indeed and gravely, yet decisively and 
unambiguously, to denounce the guilt and to brand the mem- 
ories of such offenders against the religion of Christ and the 
welfare of mankind. 

I have already taken occasion to avow my belief that it is 



COLBERT AiS^D LOUVOIS. 649 

not only permitted to us to trace the marcli of a retributive 
Providence in the history of mankind, hut that reverently and 
humbly to interpret the laws by which the Divine government 
of the world is conducted is the highest of the ends with a 
view to which any wise man engages in a review of that his- 
tory. To myself it seems impossible that any such man should 
well consider the events which followed these persecutions with- 
out regarding them as among the rnost signal examples of the 
retributive justice of Grod. Even they who dislike and avoid, 
as unphilosophical, the religious phraseology of such an avow- 
al, are not seldom driven to the use of more circuitous, but 
not, I think, more profound terms, to give expression to the 
same general meaning. 

The extent of the depopulation to which France was sub- 
jected by the Edict of October, 1685, has been estimated by 
many different writers of great authority in terms varying 
with their respective sympathies, political or religious. The 
Due de Bourgogne, anxious to vindicate his grandfather, ap- 
pears to have concluded that the emigrants did not exceed 
68,000. Yoltaire calculates them as amounting, in the first 
three years, to 50,000 families. Marshal Vauban represented 
to Louvois that, in five years, 100,000 Frenchmen had fled 
the country ; and that 9000 of the best seamen, with 12,000 
soldiers and 600 officers, had joined the enemies of France. 
M. de Sisraondi considers the loss to have exceeded 300,000 
men ; and M. Capefigue, the latest writer on the subject, hos- 
tile to the name and cause of the Protestants, reports, as the 
result of his searches into the still extant provincial records, 
that at least 225,000 of their number quitted the kingdom. 
But all these writers are agreed that the fugitives were among 
the bravest, the most intelligent, and the most industrious 
members of society, and that they carried with them into hos- 
tile countries the mechanical arts by which they had, till then, 
enriched their own, and by which they far more than repaid 
the hospitality which every where welcomed them. 

Of the numbers who perished in ineffectual attempts to es- 
cape, in confficts with the troops of Louvois, on the scaffold, 
in the prisons, and on the galleys, the conjectural estimates 
are still more various and uncertain. But no one disputes that 
the loss was enormous, or that the universal alarm and anxie- 



650 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER' 

ty which were protracted during so many years induced other 
and scarcely less lamentable evils. 

The cry of distress from the sufferers was answered from 
every part of Europe hy a cry of pity and of indignation. It 
gave to the confederacy against Louis both the energy of the 
vindictive passions, and the support which, in drawing the 
sword, men derive from the belief that it is wielded in a sacred 
cause against the common enemy of mankind. 

By this egregious error, as well as crime, of Louis and his 
counselors, William, the head of that confederacy, was enabled 
to wrest from the King of France, and to vindicate as his own, 
the position which Henry IV., and Richelieu, and Mazarin, and 
even Louis himself, had assumed as protector and guide of the 
Protestant powers. This hereditary weapon of his house was 
thenceforward turned with fatal efficacy against it. The vic- 
tories of Eugene and Marlborough, the humiliations of Grer- 
truydenberg, and the concessions of Utrecht, were all among 
the direct results of the Dragonnades, and of the revocation of 
the Edict of Nantes. 

But they were not the only or the most fatal results. The 
age in which Louis lived was far too enlightened for the sub- 
missive endurance of such enormities. They gave birth to new 
and dangerous ideas. They suggested questions never to be 
discussed with safety in any land in which the fictions of gov- 
ernment are at the same time falsehoods. They provoked even 
the devout Fenelon to inquire into the grounds on which the 
will of a single man was to be the arbiter of the happiness and 
of the creeds of millions. They contributed largely to dissolve 
the illusions of French loyalty to the absolute King of France. 
G-reat as was the descent from the " Telemaque" to the " So- 
cial Contract," that descent had now become inevitable. The 
grave protests of the Archbishop of Cambray against so glaring 
an infringement of the laws of the Grospel and of the feelings 
of humanity ripened at last into the protest of Rousseau against 
the fundamental principles of all human society. Among the 
countless causes which were to combine to overthrow the Dy- 
nasty of the Bourbons, and to conduct the descendants of Lou- 
is to the scaffold and to exile, few were more active than the 
blind and bigoted zeal with which, at the bidding of priests, 
and women, and evil counselors, and especially of Le Tellier 



COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 651 

aiid Louvois, he sentenced so large a proportion of his unof- 
fending subjects to unmerited sufferings of the same general 
nature. 

That in the all-wise and equitable judgment of Him whose 
judgments are alone of any real importance to the highest or 
to the meanest of us, the offense of Louis may have been mit- 
igated by many considerations, of which Omniscience alone 
can take cognizance, I willingly and gladly believe. He was 
a man of many noble purposes and of many generous impulses ; 
and he labored under disadvantages and temptations by which 
no other man was ever so powerfully assailed. But to us he 
is known only as the depositary of one of the highest trusts 
which was ever committed by God to any of his creatures ; 
and, as his elevation was eminent, and his abuse of it conspic- 
uous, so, according to a general law of our existence, was the 
magnitude of his offense proclaimed by the magnitude of the 
punishment which it drew upon himself and on those whose 
felicity or sorrows were inseparable from his. 

If any teacher of what is called " the positive''' shall reject 
this teaching as puerile or as superstitious, let him at least 
substitute some other explanation of phenomena which no 
skepticism can dispute, and of sequences which no incredulity 
can deny. In the mean while we will cling to our long-cher- 
ished belief that the bonds are still unbroken and indissoluble, 
which, as our Bibles assure us, connected together, in the days 
of old, the oppression of the just and the judicial chastisement 
of the oppressor. 



652 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 



LECTURE XXIII. 

ON THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY AS ADMINISTERED BY LOUIS XIV. IN PERSON. 

On the death of Mazarin, Louis XIV. had announced that 
he would be his own chief minister. On the death of Louvois 
in 1691, that boast was, for the first time, completely verified. 
Better had it been for France if he had continued to the last 
in a real, though in a disguised pupilage. He was admirably- 
qualified to sustain the character of a king, and no less emi- 
nently unfit to discharge the more arduous office of an admin- 
istrator. 

Of all the external advantages which best become a mon- 
arch, both nature and fortune were bountiful, if not rather 
prodigal, to Louis. It was well said, that if the word " maj- 
esty" had never been in use before, it must have been invent- 
ed to characterize him. His person was stately and of exqui- 
site proportions. The consciousness of supreme authority, 
tempered by a generous respect toward even the meanest of his 
associates, gave to his countenance a noble expression, to which 
each of his finely-sculptured features contributed its share. 
In all his gestures the sense of high dignity was animated and 
controlled by a graciousness which captivated every one who 
approached him, and by an elegance which seemed instinctive 
in his nature. His courtesy to all men, and still more to all 
women, was that of a preux chevalier. His familiar conver- 
sation was grave but engaging, replete with curious anecdotes, 
and abounding in reflections well weighed if not profound, and 
unborrowed if not original. His more sustained elocution flow- 
ed with facility and copiousness ; and if no man exacted so 
large a tribute of applause, none possessed in greater perfec- 
tion the talent of bestowing praise which went straight to the 
heart, and settled there. 

I doubt whether any human being ever enjoyed, in greater 
perfection, the blessing of nerves toned to habitual energy, and 
exempt from all morbid sensitiveness. Heat, cold, pain, fa- 



LOUIS XIV. 653 

tigue, and hunger, seemed to have no power over him. Not 
only his delicate courtiers, but his hardy veterans, admu-ed the 
stoicism of then* mvulnerahle king ; and his mental composure 
was on a level with his bodily hardihood. No provocation 
could excite him to unseemly anger, and no calamity could 
depress him to unmanly dejection. If he was often the victim, 
he was never the slave of appetite or passion. Though con- 
stantly exposed to the allurements of the most exquisite flat- 
tery and of the most fascinating caresses, he never yielded 
himself to the guidance of any favorite, male or female, but 
adliered, with immutable constancy and calmness, to the min- 
isters whom he had either trained or chosen. 

This unshaken equilibrium of mind and firmness of bodily 
constitution enabled Louis to maintain a continuity of mental 
labor, an exact method in business, and a consistency of pur- 
pose, which imparted a certain dramatic unity of action to the 
whole of his long career. Under all vicissitudes of good and 
evil fortune, he lived for the single purpose of enlarging and 
consolidating the powers of his crown. 

Louis was a self- worshiper ; but to maintain that worship 
he carefully cherished in his bosom, and practiced in his pri- 
vate relations, the virtues which he most highly respected, 
such as truth, honor, courtesy, courage, and fidelity to his 
promises — except, indeed, the promise which he made on his 
espousals. It was his evil fortune to be the object of a yet 
more intoxicating worship from the illustrious authors by 
whom he was surrounded, but it was also his wisdom to make 
a skillful use even of that disadvantage. He appreciated, ex- 
tolled, and not seldom rewarded their genius, and earned in 
exaggerated, but yet immortal praises, a recompense such as 
a thousand-fold the same expenditure of money or of labor in 
any other direction could not have purchased for him. Yet, 
if it be indeed true, as some modern French writers maintain, 
that the great dramatists of his age at once represented and 
apologized for the disorderly passions of the enamored king in 
the mimic heroes whom they sent to head the stage before him, 
well indeed had it been both for him and for them if they had 
substituted their keenest shafts of satire for the most seductive 
and eloquent of those dishonest eulogies. 

I do not think that either the writings of Louis, or the his- 



654 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OP 

tories or memoires of his reign, justify any high, estimate of 
his intellectual powers. He had indeed, in perfection, some 
of the talents of a mere man of business. He could sustain 
the weight of any number of details, however intricate or te- 
dious ; and, within a range of ideas neither very comprehensive 
nor very profound, was perspicacious, accurate, and persever- 
ing. But there is no proof, nor, indeed, any considerable sug- 
gestion, that he was skillful in the practical science of govern- 
ment, or well instructed in any of the moral sciences which 
are tributary to it. 

His memory is, however, enshrined in Voltaire's " Siecle de 
Louis Q,uatorze." The king and his great eulogist seem to 
have been born for the express purpose of bearing to each other 
the relation of hero and historian, so complete and so harmoni- 
ous was the correspondence between the dramatic majesty of 
the G-rand Monarque of Versailles and the dramatic imagina- 
tion of the philosopher of Ferney. Nature had lavished on the 
imperator of France all the gifts, and Fortune all the felicities, 
which the dictator of the republic of letters could best appre- 
ciate and portray. The dominion of either potentate has now, 
indeed, passed away, but the book to which this alliance be- 
tween them gave birth must ever remain an inimitable monu- 
ment of the greatness both of the idol and the idolater. Nor, 
indeed, is any one likely to hazard such an imitation. We 
have as little prospect of seeing a new Siecle de Louis Qua- 
torze as a new tragedy on the story of Zaire. It is a trophy 
to the fame of Louis which no meaner hand can either embel- 
lish or subvert. But, while it protects his memory against all 
injurious assaults, it may, for that very reason, impart free- 
dom to the attempt to estimate rightly, even though it be un- 
favorably, his real character as the personal administrator of 
the government of France. 

It is, indeed, an attempt which has been made so often, and 
by authors of so much eminence, that, unless by sacrificing 
truth to novelty, I believe it to be impossible to offer any thing 
on the subject which would not be, in substance, a repetition 
of what has been said, and well said, before. The pencil and 
the chisel did not multiply representations of the bodily form 
and features of Louis during his life-time more frequently than 
the pen has delineated his character since his death. The his- 



LOUIS XIV. 6-55 

tories and the memoirs of his reign may he said to emulate the 
numher and the gigantic proportions of those royal edifices by 
which it was iUustrated ; and all that remains to any one who 
would now pronounce a just judgment on the conduct of the 
great king himself, is to follow the best of the innumerable 
guides who present themselves to his notice. I therefore have 
selected M. Lemontey as my chief authority, believing as I do 
that his essay " Sur I'Etablissement Monarchique de Louis 
XIV." is at once the most complete and the most compendious 
of the various summaries which have been published of the 
facts to which I shall have occasion to refer as the basis of 
the conclusions which are to follow. 

Louis himself, indeed, has been drawn by his own hand 
more distinctly, if less powerfully, than by M. Lemontey, or 
than by Yoltaire himself. Though an illiterate man, he was 
a diligent writer, and his collected works fill six octavo vol- 
umes. In the first and second of them will be found his Me- 
moires Historiques, addressed to the Dauphin, and containing 
a series of instructions for his guidance whenever he should 
be called to wear the crown of France. The following extracts 
from them will explain what was his estimate of his own kingly 
duties and prerogatives. Yet it should be observed that these 
isolated passages are detached from a context which is gener- 
ally honorable both to the character and the understanding 
of their royal author ; and that his naked theory of despotism 
is really propounded in his memoirs, not idly or ostentatiously, 
but in order to enforce upon his destined successor those sacred 
duties which he judged to be inseparable from the possession 
of absolute authority. 

"It is," writes the royal interpreter of the science of gov- 
ernment, "the will of Heaven, who has given kings to man, 
that they should be revered as his vicegerents, he having re- 
served to himself alone the right to scrutinize their conduct." 
"It is the will of G-od that every subject should yield to his 
sovereign an implicit obedience." " The worst calamity which 
can befall any one of our rank is to be reduced to that sub- 
jection in which the monarch is obliged to receive the law 
from his people." " It is the essential vice of the English mon- 
archy that the king can make no extraordinary levies of men 
or money without the consent of the Parliament, nor convene 



656 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

the Parliament without impairing his own authority." "All 
property within our realm belongs to us in virtue of the same 
title. ^ The funds actually deposited in our treasury, the funds 
in the hand of revenue officers, and the funds which we allow 
our people to employ in their various occupations, are all equal- 
ly subject to our control." " Be assured that kings are ab- 
solute lords, who may fully and freely dispose of all the proper- 
ty in the possession either of churchmen or of laymen, though 
they are bound always to employ it as faithful stewards." 
" Since the lives of his subjects belong to the prince, he is 
obliged to be solicitous for the preservation of them." " The 
first basis of all other reforms was the rendering my own will 
properly absolute." Such, in his more contemplative moods, 
was his view of his own kingly powers. In his colloquial mo- 
ments the same doctrines were more pithily compressed into 
his celebrated aphorism, " L'Etat c'est moi." 

It was at the date of the treaty of Nimeguen, of August, 
1678, that this autocratic theory had received the most com- 
plete practical development ; for, at that time, the dominion of 
Louis was elevated to its greatest height, and was resting upon 
its most secure foundation. What, then, were those elements 
of power in reliance on which he so confidently maintained 
those doctrines in his own person, and so unambiguously in- 
culcated them on the heir-apparent of his crown ? 

First. His lofty conception of his own regal state was sus- 
tained by the command of a regular army, such as the Eu- 
ropean world had never before seen since the days of Charle- 
magne, or perhaps of the Antonines. The veterans who had 
grown up during his minority in the lawless wars of the 
Fronde had been silently, but rapidly disbanded, and their 
ranks had been filled by boys, trained up from their youth in 
a strict and salutary discipline. Boileau, after attending a re- 
view of that young army, said with equal truth and humor, 
" Elle sera fort bonne quand elle sera majeure ;" and so it 
happened. They were carefully instructed in all the maneu- 
vers and military arts which G-ustavus Adolphus had intro- 
duced into modern warfare. They were the first French troops 
who were clothed, armed, and accoutered uniformly and ac- 
cording to fixed regulations. They were recruited by royal 
officers, and not, as formerly, by the governors of the different 



LOUIS XIV. 657 

provinces. By the king himself, and no longer by those gov- 
ernors, all commissions were granted, and all promotions made 
among them. The ordnance, the engineers, the commissariat, 
and all the other military departments now, for the first time, 
received a regular organization. The offices of constable, high 
admiral, lieutenant general of France, and all the other high 
dignities which conferred on the holders of them a great and 
indefinite authority, both over the troops and in the civil gov- 
ernment, were suppressed ; and the soldier's ambition was 
limited to warlike distinctions, and, as the most elevated of 
them all, to the rank of Marechal de France. It was in this 
service that Conde, Turenne, and Luxembourg had risen to 
the highest glory. Yauban had created the science of fortifi- 
cation. Louvois had administered, with unrivaled energy, the 
financial concerns and the internal economy of the forces whom 
those great generals had conducted in the field. Honors free- 
ly and judiciously bestowed stimulated the ardor of those who 
were able to bear arms ; and the Hotel des Invalides, the most 
superb of all the edifices of the capital of France, was con- 
structed for the solace of the veterans. And thus, in the course 
of a few years, was called into existence the most formidable 
of European armies. It was trained to exact obedience, gov- 
erned with perfect order, and paid with punctilious regularity. 
It exulted in its own achievements, and gloried in the reputa- 
tion of its chiefs. But, above all, it was enthusiastically de- 
voted to the king. At their head he had frequently, in the 
sieges of fortified towns, claimed for himself the post of honor 
and of danger, and had not seldom accompanied and command- 
ed them in the camp. In his name every trophy was won. 
By him every substantial recompense was awarded ; and by 
him, also, the honors of war were conferred with a majesty, a 
cordiality, and a grace which immeasurably enhanced their 
value. 

By these methods, or by such as these, Louis had acquired 
that great first instrument of all arbitrary power, a soldiery 
who had ceased to be citizens, who regarded the military serv- 
ice as the only path to wealth and eminence, and who sought 
renown by cultivating the favor, not of their fellow-subjects, 
but of their sovereign alone. The legionau-es of the King of 
France were at the same time his praetorians, and to that irre- 

Tt 



658 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

sistitle armament the people of France had been brought into 
a willing, or, rather, an ostentatious subjection. 

For it was not embodied for the encounter with foreign ene- 
mies alone. It was the effective instrument of the royal will 
in every branch of the civil government. Soldiers were ever 
at hand to enforce the payment of public taxes. Soldiers were 
ever ready to compel obedience to the orders of the executive 
authority. Soldiers, as we lately saw, were employed even as 
missionaries, to inculcate obedience to the spiritual dominion 
of Rome, by executing those dragonnades which brought into 
every Protestant dwelling every scourge which bigotry, licen- 
tiousness, and rapacity could inflict upon the wretched inhab- 
itants. 

Secondly. The civil government of France, under Louis 
Xiy., acquired a concentration and an energy like that of some 
vast encampment. Eventually it became no empty boast that 
he would be himself his own chief minister. After the death 
of Colbert and of Louvois, the other functionaries of the state 
were not merely his inferiors or his servants, but were, in the 
proper sense of the word, his subordinates also. France was 
subject to his single will. The States-General were extinct. 
The Provincial States, as we shall hereafter see, had ceased to 
meet. The Parliaments were silent and submissive. Taxes 
were imposed by royal edicts, in whatever form and to what- 
ever amount seemed fit to the great autocrat, and were levied, 
without opposition, from his subjects. Throughout the prov- 
inces, the ancient administrators of the local government had 
given place to the intendants, who, originally appointed by 
Richelieu, had become the immediate delegates, in every part 
of the kingdom, of the vast prerogatives of the crown. 

The existing centralization of power in France, so foreign to 
our own habits of thought and action, is as ancient as the days 
of Louis XIV. ; and his introduction of it is still applauded by 
some even of those who, in the present times, have the most 
eloquently arraigned his despotism. They draw an impressive 
and a just comparison between the regularity, the method, and 
the efficiency of his system of internal rule, and the violence, 
the frauds, and the extravagance of the earlier system for which 
it was substituted ; and if his people were really reduced by 
any inevitable necessity to the choice between the disorders 



LOUIS XIV. 659 

of a dispersed and incoherent administration on the one hasd, 
and the tyranny of a centralized government on the other, it 
must, indeed, be admitted that he chose for them the lighter 
evil of the two. But of the real existence of any such neces- 
sity I am not aware that any proof has been or could be given. 

Thirdly. To secure to that central power its characteristic 
decision and promptitude, Louis became the founder of the 
police which has ever since exercised so great an influence in 
France. The chief objects of that institution were indeed the 
prevention of crime and the maintenance of the public peace, 
but it was also designed to secure the royal authority against 
all secret conspiracies and intrigues ; and with that view it was 
supported by a systematic espionage, and became a vast net, 
of which the minister of police held the strings, and which 
inclosed almost every member of society witliin its invisible 
meshes. D'Argenson was the Fouche of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. 

Fourthly. The absolute powers of Louis XIV. were sus- 
tained by the ecclesiastical not less than by the other orders 
of his subjects. In virtue of the Concordat of August, 1516, 
between Francis I. and Leo X., the King of France had become 
the patron of all episcopal sees, of all royal abbeys, and of many 
parochial benefices. By the skillful use of that patronage 
Louis was enabled to attach to his service and person every 
considerable family in his kmgdom. Sometimes he bestowed 
the cure of souls upon laymen, in commendam. Sometimes 
he charged the revenues of particular churches with pensions 
for the support of his favorites. The abbeys became the ap- 
panages of noble lords or of noble ladies. The mitres were al- 
most invariably bestowed on men of high birth but of mean 
fortunes. The temporalities of the Church were thus employed 
for the corruption of the world. The single mitigation of the 
evil was, that the sacerdotal aristocracy was composed of men 
whose hereditary rank secured for them a liberal education, 
elegant manners, and at least decorous lives. If, in the reign 
of Louis XIY., the mitre in the G-allican Church adorned the 
brows of no candidates for canonization, it was very rarely dis- 
graced by the scandalous habits or open immoralities of those 
who wore it. Nor were the French bishops much, or often, in- 
volved in the cabals of worldly ambition. After the death of 



660 ~ THE ABSOLUTE BIONARCHY OF 

Mazarin, Louis intrusted no ohuroliman with any considerable 
authority in the state ; and though he confided the education 
of the Dauphin to Bossuet and to Fenelon, he did not invite, 
and would not have permitted, even these illustrious men to 
exert their genius and eloquence beyond the appropriate sphere 
of their sacred functions. 

Fifthly. The nobility of France also were constrained to 
minister to the elevation of their sovereign by a virtual abdi- 
cation of their own. The ancient feudal chiefs had, indeed, 
long since disappeared, but the later Noblesse, of which Charles 
V. and Louis XL were the founders, had, even from its origin, 
been subject to great indignities. Louis XL ennobled not only 
the municipal officers of the great cities, but his own menial 
servant. Charles VIII. , to the consternation of his age, gi-anted 
the same honor to a bastard. Charles IX. sold patents of no- 
bility by twenties and thirties at a time. Henry HI. created 
1000 new nobles in the single year 1576 ; and at last a mul- 
titude of persons assumed the same rank by a mere lawless 
usurpation, Louis XIV. was the first to declare against the 
Noblesse and their privileges that war which was at last to be 
triumphant in the Revolution. Jle instituted a severe inquiry 
into the validity of their pretensions to that rank, and perse- 
vered in pursuing it without regard to the bitter humiliations 
to which it subjected so many of the claimants of hereditary 
titles. He selected all the principal ministers of his crown from 
plebeian families ; and, to induce the poor nobility to seek their 
maintenance by commercial pursuits, he published an edict, 
declaring that such occupations should derogate nothing from 
their rank and station in society. The exhortation and the in- 
dulgence were alike indignantly rejected, and the words Che- 
valier d'Industrie, then first introduced into the French tongue, 
are said to be the record of the preference which many of those 
high-born persons gave to a descent into the high road with 
visors and pistols, over a descent into the counting-house with 
pens and rulers. Their number was enormous, amounting, it 
is computed, to not less than 30,000 families. To deliver him- 
self from that hungry and rapacious swarm became one of the 
most serious embarrassments of the king. After largely in- 
creasing the establishment of officers in the army for their re- 
lief, he at length embodied whole corps, composed exclusively 



LOUIS XIV, 661 

of these indigent gentlemen. The result was, to place him- 
self at the head of the most costly, irascible, intrepid, and in- 
telligent force in Europe, But it was a school in which the 
proudest learned the great lesson of obedience ; for even when 
not under arms, the most ancient and illustrious duke was com- 
pelled to yield precedence to the youngest Marechal de France 

While the necessitous aristocracy were thus tamed in the 
camp or destroyed in the field of battle, the more affluent were 
attracted to the court by other motives. Thither came the ru- 
ral lords from Auvergne, or Brittany, or Provence ; for, to with- 
hold that homage was to provoke the royal displeasure and the 
ridicule of society. Thither came also the noble aspirants 
after honors, preferment, pleasure, or fashion ; for of these the 
court was the seat and centre. There they sacrificed their 
independence, and squandered their resources in dress, and 
equipages, and gallantry, and gaming ; and there they repaired 
those losses by the acceptance of royal gratuities, bestowed on 
them in every form the best calculated to mortify the pride 
of rank and to wound all honest feelings of self-respect. And 
there also Louis, the most accomplished of gentlemen, habitu- 
ally exacted and received from the noblest of his realm adula- 
tions and menial services better becoming the palace of Ispa- 
han than the chateau of Versailles, The individual nobles 
who, in the reign of Louis XIIL, had aspired to a competition 
with the royal authority, had been crushed by the iron hand 
of Richelieu, Their order itself was degraded by the four- 
teenth Louis into a band of mercenary soldiers or of servile 
courtiers. 

Sixthly, The magistracy also was rendered tributary to his 
absolute power. The Parliaments had, to no inconsiderable 
extent, succeeded to the authority of the States-Greneral, and 
under the shelter of legal forms exercised at least a suspensive 
veto on all royal ordinances, and especially on all fiscal edicts. 
Destitute as they were of all material force, they had long 
possessed a moral power, to which the power of the sword ren- 
dered a reluctant and almost unconscious obeisance ; and the 
brightest page of French history is that which records the cour- 
age, the disinterestedness, and the learning of that company 
of pedantic lawyers. But from his boyhood Louis had been 
taught to regard them with antipathy and contempt. He was 



662 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

but seventeen years old when, entering that veherahle assem- 
bly booted and spurred, and (it is usually added) insolently 
brandishing his riding whip, he dissolved their meeting, for- 
bade them ever again to prefer any remonstrance to him, and 
commanded them to confine themselves strictly within the 
limits of their judicial office ; nor, during the remainder of his 
long reign, did he once condescend to solicit or to accept their 
advice. Excluded from their political functions, they found 
in the assiduous discharge of their duties as judges a shelter 
from indignities and danger ; and, ceasing to be the antago- 
nists of the king, they became the instruments of his absolute 
dominion. Before their tribunal he could humble the proud- 
est grandees of France. By their concurrence he could impart 
a seeming legality to his taxation ; and by their agency he 
was able to carry into execution all the severe and formidable 
provisions of his penal code of 1670. A more convenient bul- 
wark could, indeed, hardly have been interposed between an 
arbitrary throne and the discontents of the people ; for, exist- 
ing as they did, not by popular representation, but by the ap- 
pointment of the crown, the public indignation could always 
be readily directed against them, while they were altogether 
dependent on the sovereign for support against it. 

Seventhly. The Tiers Etat, or Commons of France, were 
at this time in a state of abject insignificance and political im- 
potency. They bore nearly the whole burden of direct taxa- 
tion, they performed the corvees, or personal services on the 
public roads, and they lived under all the pi^essure of the feu- 
dal tenures, and of the yet subsisting seignorial jurisdictions. 
The incorporated towns alone retained the ancient forms of 
civic liberty and the semblance of their ancestral franchises. 
But these forms and semblances had survived the once hving 
realities. Louis, as we formerly saw, claimed and exercised 
the right of superseding the elected municipal ofiicers, to make 
way for officers of his own appointment, and those appoint- 
ments he disposed of at a kind of public auction. In this 
manner he put up to sale, in 1681, all the employments at the 
Hotel de Yille at Paris; and eleven years later he displaced, 
in favor of his own nominees, the elected mayors and judicial 
assessors of every other city in France except Lyons. To en- 
hance the price of the more considerable of these civic offices, 



LOUIS XIV. 663 

he sometimes sold with them hereditary patents of nobility, 
and sometimes he consented to leave a commune in possession 
of its electoral franchises in consideration of the payment of a 
sum of money sufficient to indemnify him against what he 
lost by that forbearance. The extent of this abuse will be 
best illustrated by a single example. It is that of the city of 
E-ennes, where, in the course of fourteen years, the king cre- 
ated and sold nineteen royal offices in the militia of the city, 
all the seats in the civic tribunals, five employments in the 
local police, with two in the fiscal and one in the legal de- 
partments ; nor mu.st it be omitted that, in the list of this 
royal merchandise, the king was not ashamed to include the 
office of house-porter to the Hotel de Ville. If Louis the Fat 
and Louis the Saint are really entitled to the glory of having 
founded municipal liberty in France, Louis the Grreat is much 
more clearly entitled to the reproach of having destroyed it. 

Eighthly. In a preceding lecture I adverted to the absolute 
dependence into which Louis had reduced the men of letters 
of France. It was a conquest even yet more essential than 
any of the rest to the maintenance of his personal supremacy. 
It gave him the greatest of all powers — the power of directing 
and controlling public opinion. It gave him, as the instru- 
ments of that power, an assemblage of writers who, even if in- 
ferior in genius to the philosophers, poets, and dramatists who 
have conferred immortal renown on the ages of Lorenzo and 
of Elizabeth, were still decidedly their superiors in the gift of 
forming and captivating the taste of their fellow-countrymen 
in their own and all succeeding generations. When Boileau 
was as profuse in panegyric on Louis as in satire on all other 
men — when Mohere, who laughed at every body else, worshiped 
him — when Racine's devotion to his Creator was reconciled 
with the idolatry of his king — when La Rochefoucauld, in his 
" indictment against human nature," could find place for en- 
comiums on that one bright exception — when the eloquence 
of Bossuet could stoop from its loftiest flights to celebrate the 
virtues of his royal patron — when both the learning of the 
Benedictines and the piety of the Port Royalists rendered a de- 
vout homage to the great monarch — and when the casuistry 
of the Jesuits apologized for his offenses, how could it be but 
that every meaner voice should join in the loud chorus of ad- 



664 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

ulation, whioli, during more than half a century, never ceased 
to extol the courage, the wisdom, the genius, and the triumphs 
of the universal idol ? And how could it be but that he who 
inhaled the fumes of such sacrifices, offered to him by such a 
priesthood, should yield his better reason to that intoxicating 
influence, and believe himself to be that miracle of nature 
which they delineated ? I doubt the truth, for I can not as- 
certain the authority of the story, that William III. indig- 
nantly repelled the plaudits of a theatre by the question, " Do 
the idiots mistake me for the king of France ?" But, even if 
untrue, it is no inapt illustration of the then prevailing opin- 
ion of the extent and of the value of the flatteries which Louis 
was accustomed to receive and to welcome from his subjects. 

The two foundations of the absolute throne of Louis XIV. 
were, therefore, terror and admiration : the terror of a power 
which had subjugated the army, the Church, the magistracy, 
the noblesse, and the municipalities ; the admiration of a power 
to which literature and art, arms and fortune, rendered their 
richest and their uninterrupted tribute. King-worship had 
never before taken so entire a possession of any Christian state. 
Never had the luxurious pomp of an Oriental court been so in- 
timately and so long associated with the energies, the refined 
tastes, and the intellectual culture of a European sovereignty. 
During fifty successive years, Louis continued to be the great- 
est actor on the noblest stage, and in the presence of the most 
enthusiastic audience of the world. At how boundless an ex- 
pense of toil and treasure that representation was conducted — 
how it was continued even in the midst of famine and all oth- 
er national calamities — and how the gorgeous drama of Yer- 
sailles was relieved by the yet more animating spectacle of 
military triumphs, or darkened by gloom of military reverses, 
is known to all who have read even the most familiar accounts 
of the Siecle de Louis Q,uatorze. 

To substitute, however, for that general impression a more 
definite view of the principal results of this absolute dominion, 
it may be convenient to advert, however briefly, to the finan- 
cial consequences of the wars into which Louis plunged ; to 
the character of his diplomatic relations with all other powers ; 
to the fiscal calamities induced by his waste of the national re- 
sources in maintaining the pomp and luxuries of his court ; to 



LOUIS XIV. 665 

tlie ejflfect of that lavish expenditure on the morals and man- 
ners of his age ; to the iniquitous persecutions into which the 
possession of unrestrained power hurried him ; and to the man- 
ner in which the abuse of that power contributed to the event- 
-ual subversion of his dynasty. 

First, then, the wars of Louis with the other powers of Eu- 
rope were commenced on four different occasions between the 
death of Mazarin and the Peace of Utrecht, and on each of 
those occasions, the French historians themselves being the 
judges, were unprovoked and unjustifiable. As he thought on 
that subject, so he wrote. " Self-aggrandizement," he informs 
his grandson, "is at once the noblest and the most agreeable 
occupation of kings." But he affected rather the glory of a 
conqueror than the reputation of a general. He invariably 
declined a battle in the field with his enemies, apparently be- 
cause he would not run the risk of compromising his majes- 
ty by the indignities of a possible defeat. He as invariably 
availed himself of every opportunity of undertaking in person 
the siege of the strongest cities, because in such enterprises 
the genius of Vauban and of his other engineers assured him 
of a rich harvest of renown. But, ere long, he wisely aban- 
doned to his officers the conduct of his armies. His keen sense 
of ridicule taught him that a king of France could not, in im- 
itation of a Persian sophy, carry with him to the wars his 
courtiers, and courtesans, and mimes, and cooks, and side- 
boards, and stage scenery, without provoking from the wits 
and jesters missiles to which even his artillery could make no 
effectual answer. He therefore withdrew from the camp the 
luxuries of his court, but not without drawing to his court 
much of the licentiousness of the camp. A great, though not 
an intolerable evil ; but the evil of his habitually maintaining 
those vast encampments was such as could be endured neither 
by his neighbors nor by his people. It is with hesitation, be- 
cause it is with a full knowledge how great are the fallacies 
to which statistics so often give shelter, that I transcribe the 
common estimate of the number and the cost of his great arm- 
aments. It represents the standing army of Louis as having 
amounted to 400,000 men under arms, or, as I rather under- 
stand the statement on the muster-rolls, and it assures us that, 
for the support of the ten campaigns of the war of 1688, the 



666 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

French treasury disbursed between forty and forty-one mill- 
ions of pounds sterling, and between eighty-one and eighty- 
two millions of the same money on account of the twelve cam- 
paigns of the war of 1701. Prodigal as such a waste of treas- 
ure may seem, well had it been for mankind if that waste had 
been the most calamitous result of those campaigns ; but, to 
the disgrace of our common Christianity and of our common 
nature, History has a far darker tale to tell of the utter ruin 
and desolation, by the armies of Louis, of the defenseless cit- 
ies of Spires, Worms, and Oppenheim, of all the territories of 
Treves and Baden, and of all the towns, villages, and hamlets 
of the Palatinate, and of the unarmed inhabitants of those once 
smiling regions — crimes which, as they were wantonly perpe- 
trated in cold blood, and by one Christian and civilized people 
upon another, threw into the shade the worst ravages of Attila 
or G-enseric, and almost challenged a comparison with the 
atrocities of the day of St. Bartholomew. 

Nor was the character of his diplomatic relations with other 
powers more defensible. In his pursuit of that "noblest and 
most agreeable occupation of kings — self-aggrandizement," 
Louis not only violated all the laws of nations and of human- 
ity in his warfare with his enemies, but was deliberately, and 
on principle, regardless of the obligations of good faith toward 
his allies. " In dispensing with the exact observance of treat- 
ies (such is the language of his instructions to the Dauphin), 
we do not," he says, "violate them; for the language of such 
instruments is never to be understood literally. We must em- 
ploy, in our treaties, a conventional phraseology, just as we use 
complimentary expressions in society. They are indispensa- 
ble to our intercourse with one another, but they always mean 
much less than they say." " The more unusual, circumspect, 
and reiterated were the clauses by which the Spaniards ex- 
cluded me from assisting Portugal, the more evident it is that 
the Spaniards did not believe that I should really withhold 
such assistance." 

Machiavelli never taught a more dissolute doctrine, nor Es- 
cobar a more convenient sophistry ; nor did Moliere ever as- 
cribe to his Mascarilles a greater proficiency in imposture, than 
Louis XIV. thus openly avows and attributes to himself. Nor 
did he ^vrite thus to amuse himself with a barren theory or a 



LOUIS XIV. 667 

pleasant exaggeration. He actually rendered to Portugal the 
aid which he had just engaged to withhold from her. He es- 
tablished a title to the states of Lori'aine, and to the cities of 
Colmar, Strasbourg, and Casal, by artifices at which G-ii Bias 
de Santillane would have been scandalized. He despoiled the 
Duchesse de Montpensier of her vast inheritance by a strata- 
gem better befitting the bachelor of Salamanca than a great 
king. At the moment he was bribing Charles II. to betray 
his people, he was also exciting the remnant of the Cromwel- 
lians to revolt against Charles. 

But neither the deceits nor the injustice of Louis irritated 
mankind so profoundly as his insolence. His statue, at the 
feet of which all nations were exhibited crouching and in 
chains, represented to the admiring Parisians the haughty 
spirit of their sovereign not less distinctly than his noble per- 
son. He avenged the slightest shadow of an imaginable wrong 
by the most galling insults. From such indignities Grenoa was 
not rescued by her weakness, nor Holland by the advantages, 
political and commercial, of her alliance, nor Rome by the relig- 
ious veneration rendered to her pontiffs. And therefore, when 
Philip II. and Louis XIY. had both, at length, been humbled 
before the same Batavian marshes, the nations of Europe ex- 
ulted more in the overthrow of the arrogance which had made 
war with the United Provinces, to punish the discourtesy of a 
medalist and a gazetteer, than in the defeat of the bigotry which 
had decimated the Dutch people to establish the Inquisition. 

If the immutable laws of Grod had not decreed that such 
wars, however successful, should be followed by a fearful re- 
bound of misery against the aggressors, this earth w^ould not 
be habitable. The Prench nation never recovered the waste 
of strength and treasure in the campaigns of their once idol- 
ized monarch, until his dynasty and his institutions had been 
subverted in the same common ruin. To this day they have 
never effectually recovered the wounds inflicted on their na- 
tional self-esteem by the humiliations of the war of the Span- 
ish succession. And yet neither the loss nor the shame incur- 
red by those disastrous conflicts were so deeply injurious to the 
subjects of Louis, as the fiscal calamities induced by his waste 
of the resources of his people in maintaining the pomp and 
luxuries of his court. 



668 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

Among the many conjectural estimates of the sums squan- 
dered by him on fetes, gardens, palaces, gratuities, unmerited 
pensions, and other prodigalities, it is difficult to make any 
confident preference. But the highest of them will scarcely 
seem incredible to the readers of Danjeau and St. Simon, or to 
those who contemplate the sumptuous edifices which still em- 
bellish Paris, and Marly, and Versailles, and least of all to 
those who bear in mind the economical illusions under which 
he acted. 

Those illusions taught him that his extravagance was not 
only not injurious, but positively beneficial to his subjects. 
When Madame de Maintenon solicited him to relieve the men- 
dicants who thronged his palace gates, he made what M. Say 
calls " that precious and terrible answer, which taught how to 
ruin a nation upon principle." "A large expenditure," he 
said, "is the alms-giving of kings," and he gave such alms 
until France had nearly been reduced to one vast receptacle 
for paupers. 

His fiscal measures, after the death of Colbert, attest the 
utmost extremity of distress. The invention of stamp-duties, 
and the creation and sale of an oppressive monopoly of tobac- 
co, were comparatively unimportant. Far more burdensome 
was the duty on all alienations of land, with the auxiliary 
enactment that no lease should be made to continue in force 
for more than nine years from its date, that so the alienation 
tax might be exigible at the end of every such term. Yet 
more vexatious still were his taxes on marriages and baptisms, 
and on all the other great transactions of life, which provoked 
the abandonment of all religious ordinances in those provinces 
in which they did not provoke partial insurrections. But of 
all the imposts of the bewildered monarch, the most offensive 
and intolerable was the royal tithe. In the midst of his mili- 
tary pursuits. Marshal Vauban had devised a plan for substi- 
tuting a tax of ten per cent, on the annual income of all im- 
movable property for a multitude of more vexatious and less 
profitable duties. Under the shelter of the name of that great 
man, Louis promulgated an edict for giving effect to this proj- 
ect ; but with the difference, that whereas the Marshal of 
France had contemplated a royal tithe in exchange for other 
burdens, the King of France imposed it in addition to them. 



LOUIS XIV. 669 

Nor was this all. The money horrowed on the credit of those 
revenues created a national debt, which, when due allowance 
is made for the value of money in that age, appears stupendous 
even now, with all our lamentable familiarity with such sub- 
jects. I reject, indeed, as a mere extravagance, though I know 
not how to reduce to the level of truth, the statement that it 
amounted to no less than £200,000,000 sterling. But the ac- 
ceptance of such an exaggeration by writers not habitually 
credulous or inaccurate is itself some proof that the real amount 
of the burden transmitted by Louis to his descendants was such 
as was best expressed by hyperbole, in the absence of any ex- 
act means of knowledge. 

The more prominent results of this extravagance were per- 
ceptible to the contemporary memorialists of the court and 
times of Louis XIV. Smuggling became a trade in which none 
were ashamed, and few were afraid to engage. Whole bodies 
of cavalry deserted their ranks to take their share in it. On 
the northern and eastern frontiers, the half- famished garrisons 
were in revolt. At the beginning, as at the close of the eight- 
eenth century, the place d'armes in front of the chateau of 
Versailles was thronged with hordes of destitute people clam- 
orous for relief. At length Louis the Magnificent himself was 
driven by want to Paris, humbly to sue, in person, for loans at 
an extortionate usury from Samuel Bernard, and the other 
money-lenders of his capital. 

But to those who had eyes to see and hearts to understand, 
there were perceptible still more impressive proofs than these 
of the calamities in which the prodigality of a king may in- 
volve his people. Wanton wars and heartless luxuries had 
corrupted the moral sense of that voluptuous court. The the- 
atre of Paris, at this day, would not tolerate the tone in which, 
at that time, the great Moliere mocked at conjugal fidelity in 
comedies written for the theatre of Versailles. The great mon- 
arch himself violated that duty openly and ostentatiously. He 
raised to the line of succession to his crown the sons borne to 
him by the wives of other men while his ow:\ wife was still 
living. That gaming flourished there to the most extravagant 
excess, we know from the strange avowals of the courtly Dan- 
jeau ; but, unaided by the caustic St. Simon, who would have 
conjectured that in those splendid halls a fraudulent gamester 



670 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

could he regarded in the light of an ingenious, pleasant com- 
panion ? He tells us of a duke who frequented the royal cir- 
cle, and who, he says, " was Letter liked hy the king, and had 
•more influence in society than any hody. He was," proceeds 
our author, " magnificent in every thing and a great gambler, 
and did not pique himself in fair dealing in his play ; hut many 
other great lords did the same, and only laughed at it." The 
ladies also, as we learn from the same authority, imitated the 
example. But the female conscience had, it seems, a peculiar 
tenderness on the subject of cheating at cards. No lady could 
think of retaining such unrighteous gains. No sooner had she 
touched them than she religiously gave them all away. But 
then, it must be added, the gift was always made to some 
other winner of her own sex. By carefully avoiding the words 
" interchange of winnings," the fair casuists seem also to have 
avoided all self-reproach, and to have had an easy escape with 
their discreet and lenient confessors. In this singular society 
were young gentlemen also, who relieved the tame formalities 
of other conversation by admitting to their tables and familiar 
intercourse notorious criminals, who had animating stories to 
tell of their own desperate achievements as forgers or as high- 
waymen. And young and old were alike engaged in that scan- 
dalous traffic in penalties and forfeitures, which Mr. Macau- 
lay has so vividly depicted in his portraiture of the court of 
James II. 

Among the victims of the law in France there were always 
to be found both the innocent and the rich. To multiply their 
number was to open a vein of wealth to many a necessitous 
sycophant of the court. As the miner of California to some 
newly-discovered digging, or the vulture of those regions to the 
scent of some recent carcass, so hurried the lords, and even the 
ladies, of Yersailles in search of forgotten penalties, or uncol- 
lected forfeitures, or obsolete offenses, for which the offenders 
might still be subjected to fines or confiscations. Sometimes 
the whole of any such game, when hunted down, was thrown 
by the lavish king to the informers ; sometimes he himself par- 
ticipated in the spoil. There were not wanting cases in which 
even the princesses of his house were enabled, by such re- 
sources, to repay the expenditure of the wardrobe and the 
gaming-table. The Duke of Orleans is said to have extracted 



LOUIS XIV. 671 

a million of livres from an officer in charge of the military 
chest, who had heen made over to him to be subjected to the 
peine forte et dure of a judicial process. In this crusade 
against wealthy criminals, the only persons who were abso- 
lutely excluded from the field were the destitute kindred, who 
were to partake of the ruin, though they had not partaken of 
the guilt of the offenders. 

It is said by M. Lemontey that it was at this period that 
the word " honnete" exchanged its primitive for its actual 
meaning in the French vocabulary ; that, till the latter half of 
the reign of Louis, an " honnete homme" was the name of an 
upright, not for an inoffensive man ; that, when a man's de- 
scent was said to be honnete, he was complimented on the vir- 
tuousness of his progenitors, not reminded of the mediocrity of 
their condition ; and that, when his family were described as 
honnete, it was an acknowledgment that they belonged to the 
middle ranks of society, not a suggestion that they were ple- 
beians. If the remark be accurate, it is a curious instance of 
the connection between philology and history, and of the influ- 
ence of the French court on the vernacular language of France. 

But the most impressive record of the misgovernment of 
Louis is to be found in those religious persecutions into which 
he was hurried by the possession of an absolute and irrespons- 
ible power. On the woes which he inflicted on his Protest- 
ant subjects I have already spoken. But even the members 
of his own religious communion had terrible penalties to pay 
for any dissent from his opinions. At the distance of three 
leagues from Versailles stood the splendid church and monas- 
tery of Port Royal des Champs, where dwelt the Mere Ange- 
lique and her saintly sisterhood, and near them Pascal, Ar- 
nauld, Nicole, De Sacy, and their illustrious fraternity. Those 
learned men had declared themselves unable to find in the 
" Augustinus," a posthumous work of Cornelius Jansen, bish- 
op of Ypres, five propositions, which the Pope had discovered 
there, and had censured as heretical. Those holy women, be- 
ing unable to read the Latin in which the book was written, 
had refused to affirm, either under their hands or with their 
lips, that those propositions might be found there by those who 
could read it. For these offenses the king dispersed the whole 
of the brethren of Port Royal, and exiled many of them, lev- 



672 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

eled the monastery to the ground, exhumed and gave to the 
dogs the dead bodies of such of the fraternity as had heen 
buried there, and committed the survivors to an imprisonment 
from which death alone released them. 

If the picture which I have thus laid before you of the ad- 
ministration of the government of France by Louis XIV. be in- 
deed accurate, how, it may be asked, could it happen that no 
voices were raised in his own times and country to anticipate 
the reproaches of posterity ? There were assuredly not wanting 
many men wise enough to perceive such evils, or courageous 
enough to protest against them. Why, then, were no such re- 
monstrances raised ? 

I answer, first, by referring to the explanation which I gave 
in a former lecture of the methods by which literature had 
been not merely silenced on all political questions, but had 
been brought by the court into a dependence which was the 
more servile, because it was willingly, and even ostentatiously 
borne. I answer, next, by denying the statement that the si- 
lence of the great men of France on these subjects was as com- 
plete as it is usually supposed to have been. Among such 
men a very high place is due to Fenelon, and to his pupil, the 
Due de Bourgogne. Now every one is agreed that the romance 
of Telemaque was designed to point out to the heir to the 
crown of France some of the enormous abuses of the govern- 
ment of his grandfather. But the Telemaque is neither the 
only nor the most impressive of the protests made on that sub- 
ject by its eloquent author. 

It is impossible to state with precision what was the date 
of the letter from Fenelon to Louis XIV., which is to be found 
in the eighth volume of the works of D'Alembert, although it 
is certain that it was written after the death of Louvois in 
1691. In her preface to Danjeau's Memoirs, Madame de G-en- 
lis has, indeed, disputed the authenticity of that letter alto- 
gether. She supposes it to have been forged by the skeptical 
philosopher who first gave it to the world ; and she suggests 
that he was prompted to commit this crime by his desire to 
give to his own disloyal principles the apparent sanction of one 
of the most revered of the divines of France, who was, at the 
same time, one of the holiest of her saints, and one of the most 
considerable of her men of letters. To myself the imputation 



LOUIS XIV. 673 

appears altogether incrediLle. It was in his official character 
of secretary to the Royal Academy that D^Alemhert publish- 
ed his Eloge on Fenelon, and the letter which is appended to 
it. To have been detected in the fraud imputed to him would 
have been to expose himself to infamy and ruin ; and the de- 
tection would have been perfectly easy, as he declared his man- 
uscript of the letter in question to be authenticated by the 
handwriting of the Archbishop of Cambray himself. Little 
respect is indeed due to the political or religious principles of 
D'Alembert, but he was neither wicked enough nor foolish 
enough to expose himself to so terrible a risk merely to gratify 
himself by blackening the reputation of a deceased monarch. 
Madame de Grenlis's suspicions are also, I think, repelled by 
her own elaborate and indignant demonstration of the exact 
harmony between the supposed letter and many passages of 
the Telemaque. I therefore suppose it to be genuine, and I 
think that the following extracts from it will demonstrate that 
one of the most profound and of the closest observers of what 
was passing in the court and kingdom of Louis XIV., regarded 
his administration of the government of France in a light even 
miore unfavorable than that in which I have hitherto repre- 
sented it. 

" He who takes the liberty, sire," such is the commence- 
ment of the letter, " to address this communication to you, is 
one for whom the interests of this world have but little value. 
He is not prompted to write by pique, by ambition, nor by the 
wish to intermeddle in great affairs. Though you know not 
who he is, he loves you, and reveres in your person the dele- 
gated authority of G-od himself." "Be not surprised 

if he addresses you in terms of unusual emphasis. He does 
so because truth is at once free and fearless ; but to truth you 
have not been accustomed to listen." 

" Your heart is naturally just and equitable. But they 
who had the charge of your education taught you, as your 
only principles of government, to be suspicious, and jealous, 
and haughty ; to keep virtue aloof, to dread all eminent merit, 
to prefer the society of the flexible and the cringing, and to 
cherish an exclusive regard to your own personal interests." 

" During the last thirty years, your chief ministers have 
deranged and reversed all the ancient maxims of our govern- 

Uu 



674 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

ment, in order to elevate your authority, or, rather, that they 
might increase their own ; for that authority was not really 
in your hands, but in theirs. The state and the laws are no 
more mentioned among us. The king and the royal pleasure 
are now all in all. Your ministers have infinitely extended 
both your revenue and your expenditure. They have extolled 
you to the heavens for having eclipsed the splendor of all your 
predecessors, or, in other words, for having impoverished the 
whole kingdom, that so you might introduce into your court 
a luxury alike monstrous and incurable." 

" You have, indeed, been jealous of your authority ; too 
much so, perhaps, in whatever relates to mere externals ; but, 
within his own appropriate province, each of your ministers 
has in reality been your master. Because you marked out 
the limits of the respective functions of those who really con- 
ducted your government, you imagined that you were yourself 
governing. They have been severe, haughty, unjust, violent, 
faithless. "Whether in governing at home or in negotiating 
with foreign powers, their only system has been that of men- 
acing, crushing, and annihilating their opponents. They have 
habituated you to flatteries so outrageous, and even so idol- 
atrous, that your own honor required your indignant rejection 
of them. They have rendered your name odious to the people 
ofFranee, and insufferable to your neighbors." 

Then, after an exposure of the injustice of the wars and 
conquests of Louis, the writer proceeds : " Enough, sire, has 
been said to show you that, during your whole life, you have 
been wandering from the path of justice and of truth, and, 
therefore, from the path which the Grospel prescribes. That 
long series of fearful calamities which have desolated the whole 
of Europe during the last twenty years, the blood so profusely 
shed, the multitude of the scandals which have been given, 
the cities and the villages laid in ashes, have been the lament- 
able results of that war of 1672, which was undertaken for 
your glory, and for the confusion of the gazetteers and medal- 
ists of Holland." 

" Your people, whom you are bound to love as your children, 
and who have been enthusiastically devoted to you, are dying 
of hunger. The land is nearly thrown out of cultivation. The 
cities and the country are depopulated. All trades are Ian- 



LOUIS XIV. 675 

guishingj and unable to afFovd subsistence to the artisans. 
All commerce is extinguished. In order to make and to de- 
fend your vast external conquests, you have destroyed one 
half of the internal resources of your kingdom. All France 
is but one great hospital, desolate, and unprovided with the 
necessaries of life. It is yourself, sire, by whom these disas- 
ters have been created. In the ruin of France, every thing 
has passed into your hands, and your subjects are reduced to 
live upon your bounty." 

"You do not love Grod. You do not even fear him, except 
with a servile terror. It is not Grod you fear, but hell. Your 
religion is made up of superstitions and of petty superficial 
observances. Scrupulous about trifles, you are untouched by 
the most terrible responsibilities. Your own glory, your own 
advantage, are the real and only objects of your love. You 
refer every thing to yourself, as though you were the very 
Grod of this earth, and as though every thing else in it had 
been called into existence only that it might serve as a sacri- 
fice to you." 

Then follow very unfavorable portraits of the Archbishop 
of Paris ; of La Chaise, the confessor of the king ; of Madame 
de Maintenon, and of his other confidential advisers, with a 
denunciation of their infidelity to that great trust. "Per- 
haps," proceeds the letter, " you may ask what they, who are 
thus in your confidence, ought to say to you. I answer, they 
ought to say thus : ' Humble yourself under the mighty hand 
of Gfod, if you would not that Grod should humble you. Sub- 
mit to the humiliation of making peace, and so expiate the 
glory which you have made your idol. Listen no more to the 
counsels of your flatterers. Restore to your enemies the con- 
quests which you can not retain with safety or without injus- 
tice.' Sire, he who tells you these truths is so far from being 
an enemy to your real interests, that he would lay down his 
life to see you such as Grod would have you to be ; nor does 
he ever cease to pray for you." 

Although I credit D' Alembert's assertion that he transcribed 
this letter from a manuscript authenticated by Fenelon him- 
self, yet there is no proof that it was ever transmitted to Louis, 
or that he ever saw it, or heard of it. For the credit of the 
king, I would gladly believe the story that it was conveyed 



676 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

to him by Beauvilliers at the instance of the writer ; for if it 
he really the fact that he received such a communication from 
the tutor of his grandson, and afterward promoted him to the 
archbishopric of Cambray, we must all admit with D'Aiembert 
that, for once at least, he nobly earned the title of "the Great." 
I have stated that the Duo de Bourgogne was one of those 
who felt and acknowledged the abuses of the government of 
his grandfather. I do not, of course, mean that he ever as- 
sumed the indecorous and undutiful ofhce of a censor of the 
conduct of Louis XIY. Nothing could have been more repug- 
nant to the spirit of that admirable prince, or to the lessons 
which he had received from Fenelon. But the Telemaque was 
written for his instruction, and in the imaginary court of Ido- 
menee the duke unavoidably recognized the image of the court 
of Versailles. The impression left on his mind by that, and 
by the similar lessons of his Mentor, was profound and lasting. 
He had a clear view of the evils under which France was labor- 
ing. He had a distinct foresight of the coming tempest, and 
an ardent desire to avert it. Among the papers which he left 
behind him was one which attests how deeply these subjects 
had engaged his thoughts. It was a complete scheme of con- 
stitutional reformation. It contemplated the revival of the 
States- G-ener a], and of the States of the various provinces, and 
the periodical convention of assemblies of the people in every 
canton of France. On the basis of these central and local in- 
stitutions, and through their agencies, he hoped to provide at 
once for the stability of the throne and for the good govern- 
of the people, with their own support and concurrence. 

If the Due de Bourgogne had been permitted to ascend that 
throne, and to carry his project into execution, what would 
have been the probable results of it ? If the answer to that 
question were to be given by persons imbued with the spirit 
of our own government, it would probably express their con- 
viction that such a reform would have given to France the 
greatest blessings for which any nation could be indebted to 
the sagacity and patriotism of its rulers. By such critics it 
would be applauded as a well-devised bond for the indissoluble 
union of the past, of the present, and of the future ; as calling 
into healthful activity all those popular instincts and local at- 
tachments which constitute the main-springs of the life and 



LOUIS XIV. 677 

health of a great nation ; as rendermg tributaiy to the service 
of the state those home feelings, which, of all feelings, act with 
the most constant and irresistible energy ; as affording to the 
various sections of the commonwealth the means of an invig- 
orating yet amicable rivalry ; as productive of that social har- 
mony of which the indispensable basis is to be found only in 
diversity and in contrast ; as providing for that concentration 
of power without which the state is impotent, and for that dif- 
fusion of power without which the central dommion must be 
despotic ; and, above all, as affording the means of acquhing 
those habits of self-government which constitute the ultimate 
perfection of any civil polity. 

All such anticipations and predictions would, however, I 
suppose, have been derided by the French philosophers of that 
age if they partook of the philosophical opinions which most 
find favor in France in our own. M. Alexandre Thomas, for 
example, the author of a book published in the year 1844, 
under the title of " Une Province sous Louis XIY.," would 
smile at such reveries as the dreams of narrow-minded men, 
by whom the region of pure ideas had ever been, and must ever 
be, unvisited ; for in that book he describes the state of Bur- 
gundy from 1661 to 1715, in order to establish the conclusions 
that the institutions of that province, and that the French pro- 
vincial institutions in general, in the reign of Louis XIY., were 
so entkely and irremediably absurd, that they never could have 
served as the foundations of any safe or salutary national ref- 
ormation. M. Thomas is no ordinary writer. When he ad- 
dresses himself to the arrangement of evidence and to the nar- 
ration of facts, he combines much of our English good sense 
with no less of the buoyant vivacity of a Frenchman. But 
when he unveils his theories, and writes as a philosopher, his 
style undergoes an extraordinary change. Between the glare 
of his eloquence and the darkness of his metaphysics, my own 
mental vision, at least, is effectually dazzled and overpowered. 
Nevertheless, as both his facts and his theories have a direct 
and very important bearing on any judgment we can form on 
the administration of the government of Louis XIV., I will not 
decline the attempt to indicate, though in as few words as pos- 
sible, what are the discoveries, philosophical and historical, for 
which his readers are to be prepared. 



678 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

I collect then, that, according to the doctrine of M. Thomas, 
there is a certain general law which regulates the progress of 
political society. Emerging from chaos, where its elements 
battle with each other in wild confusion, it makes a steadfast, 
thouo-h it may be a tardy, progress toward that perfect sym- 
metry and order in which its ultimate perfection consists. 
Thus the anarchy of the tenth and eleventh centuries was the 
chaotic period of France. Oat of that abyss first arose the 
feudal oligarchy — a state of orderly disorder. Then succeeded 
the Capetian despotism, destined to crush one after another of 
the countless feudal privileges, whether local and personal — 
whether corporate and municipal — ^whether legislative, admin- 
istrative, or judicial, ?&diich, as so many conflicting wrongs, 
were arrayed one against another in unappeasable hostility. 
When the iron grasp of "royalty" had subdued and annihi- 
lated them all, then " royalty," in the midst of the triumphs 
she had won, presented herself to the nation, in the person of 
Louis XIY., as the one gigantic privilege, the conqueror and 
the survivor of all the rest. Her " mission" was now fulfilled ; 
and when at last the indignant nation raised her voice in an- 
ger, " royalty," confessing her own inherent weakness, bowed 
her head and fell. Then appeared a long succession of revo- 
lutionary systems, each of which, in turn, made some great 
stride toward that ultimate consummation of symmetry and 
order which form the perfection of political society. Distant 
as that perfection may appear to some, yet France has already 
attained, by the overthrow of all privileges, to unity, that is, 
to the concentration of power in the supreme government ; to 
equality, that is, the absolute uniformity of the political fran- 
chises of all citizens ; and to liberty, that is, the sovereign do- 
minion of the people themselves. Unity, equality, and liberty 
are, therefore, those mighty and unrivaled powers, under the 
guidance of which France is advancing toward that high estate 
of national greatness and of social harmony toward which no 
other European people have as yet light enough even to aspire. 
Perhaps the high tone of M. Thomas's coloring might have 
been subdued a little if he had postponed the publication of his 
book from 1844 to 1848. But the new shapes which unity, 
equality, and liberty assumed in the last of those years, would 
have detracted nothing from the value of the facts by which 



LOUIS XIV. 679 

lie undertakes to show how desperate and irremediable was the 
misgovernment of the French provinces during the reign of 
Louis XIV. I shall not, of course, affect to compress the re- 
sults of such extensive mquiries into the fragment of time 
which remains at my disposal to-day. But neither can I en- 
thely pass them over, for they are of the utmost importance 
in resolving the question whether Louis XIV. was more wise 
in extinguishing the privileges of the provinces of France, or 
the Due de Bourgogne in regarding them as the ready basis 
on which to erect a free constitutional government. 

It appears, then, from the researches of M. Thomas, that in 
the seventeenth century the generalite of Bourgogne com- 
prised, first, the duchy of that name, then five counties, and, 
finally, three pays d'election. The duchy and counties were 
under the immediate government of the Burgandian States- 
General during their sessions ; and, in the intervals of those 
sessions, they were under the government of officers called 
elus. The Burgundian States- G-eneral were composed of the 
clergy and the nobility of the duchy, and of the deputies of 
the Tiers Etat. Each of the five counties sent thither depu- 
ties, representing the Tiers Etat of each. But the pays d'elec- 
tion were not so represented. They were under the immedi- 
ate government of the crown. 

The sessions of the Burgundian States- Greneral were hold- 
en once only in each three years, and were continued during 
about twenty days. Thus, with the exception of about three 
weeks in as many years, the duchy and the counties were des- 
titute of any representative government, but lived under the 
authority of the elus. 

Each order appointed its own elu, and other officers, called 
alcaids, who were to superintend and to control them. Each 
county had, in the same manner, a separate assembly, which 
appointed the elu for the county. There were also royal offi- 
cers having the same title of elus, who were associated with 
the nominees of the States-G-eneral and of the county assem- 
blies. 

Over all this official hierarchy presided the governor of the 
province of Burgundy, who represented the person of the king 
himself, and was invested with his prerogatives. In the sev- 
enteenth century, this government had passed into the hands 



680 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

of the great and powerful family of Conde, who held it with 
an authority not very remote from that with which, in earlier 
times, the princes of the royal house had held their apanages. 

This scheme of provincial administration already appears 
sufficiently complicated ; hut the want of symmetry, and what 
may he called logical method, was still more remarkahle in 
the composition of the Burgundian States-G-eneral. Our own 
ancient anomalies of the deserted mount of Old Sarum, or the 
highly-ornamented park and gardens of G-atton, sending each 
two members to the House of Commons, when the great man- 
ufacturing cities of the north sent no members at all, were not 
more strange than the anomalies according to which the Bur- 
gundian States were constituted. They comprised between 
400 and 500 members, of whom 72 only were commoners, the 
rest being clergy or nobles, who were not elected by their re- 
spective orders, but who held their seats proprio jure. Then, 
again, no one was eligible as a deputy of the Tiers Etat un- 
less he were a mayor or one of the chief echevins of a city ; 
and of the two deputies representing the same place, one only 
had a vote. Neither could the deputies of the Tiers Etat se- 
lect their elus and alcaids at their pleasure. They were bound 
to choose them from the citizens of particular cities according 
to a rotation, of which some cities had the benefit only on each 
alternate election, and of which other cities had so little share 
that they might be said to be almost wholly excluded. 

These anomalies (and many more which I omit) were re- 
ducible to no assignable principle whatever, but had their 
roots only in obsolete traditions and inveterate prejudices, and 
the proceedings of the States-Greneral were raiarked by a cor- 
responding instability of purpose and of character. During the 
reign of Louis XIV., the hero of their history is Nicholas Bru- 
lart. He was the member of one of those high judicial fami- 
lies which transmitted, from one generation to another, the 
presidency of the sovereign courts ; and Brulart therefore, at 
the age of thirty-four, found himself first president of the Par- 
liament of Dijon. In that capacity he acquired great renown 
by his inflexible opposition to the commands of Mazarin. Hav- 
ing been sent to Perpignan as a prisoner for refusing to regis- 
ter some of the edicts of the cardinal, he was released, and 
when the Prince de Conde again tendered to him the obnox- 



LOUIS XIV. 681 

ious edicts, "M. le Prince," was his celebrated answer, "the 
towers of Perpignan are distinctly visible from the place where 
V)'e stand." In fact, Brulart was the very ideal of a French 
magistrate, really independent in his spirit, and not without 
a certain theatrical sublimity of demeanor and of discourse. 
But when Mazarin died, and Louis XIV. announced himself 
as his own chief minister, Brulart became an altered man. 
No longer sententious and epigrammatic about the dignity of 
his judicial character and the majesty of his office, he became 
an eloquent vindicator of the absolute and irresponsible author- 
ity of the young sovereign. Nor was this servility or baseness. 
Brulart, looking on the scene before him with the eye of a states- 
man, as statesmen went in those days, seems to have been sin- 
cerely convinced that the power and greatness of the state were 
inextricably bound up with the unrestricted power and inde- 
pendence of the king. In the name of the Burgundian States- 
G-eneral, and as their president, he delivered a series of dis- 
courses, the general tone of which may be fairly inferred from 
the following extract from one of them : 

"The king being the first, and the permanent spring of all 
tranquillity and virtue in his dominions, every thing within 
them follows his impulse, and derives its character from him. 
Every profession is adorned by his virtues. The sciences are 
advanced, manners are purified, and religion is at length in 
repose ; the calm is profound, the law is obeyed, the people 
are tranquil and happy under his government ; and all these 
blessings are the fruit of that sublime composure of mmd 
with which he regulates all these interests, and watches over 
them all." 

Such, during the twenty prosperous years of the reign of 
Louis, was the style of the States-G-eneral of Burgundy, and 
of Brulart their president, in all their communications to the 
king or to his representatives. They were content to follow 
the chariot- wheels of the conqueror, and to swell the loud cho- 
rus of adulation. But with the reverses of Louis XIV., the 
language of the Burgundian States-Greneral underwent a total 
revolution. Eulogy gave place to bitter remonstrance, and the 
idol of yesterday became the object of the obloquies of to-day. 
M. Thomas pursues, in full detail, the history of these vicissi- 
tudes, and then pursuing the career of the communes of Bur- 



682 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 

gundy and of the Parliament of Dijon, convicts them all, in 
turn, of that instability of character, caprice, and unreasona- 
bleness, from which I suppose few such bodies would be found 
to be exempt, if their portraits were delineated with equal fidel- 
ity, and by as picturesque a pen. The particular inference is, 
that petty passions and local prejudices, unsettled principles 
and fluctuating opinions, narrow privileges and warring inter- 
ests, disqualified the States-G-eneral of Burgundy for the po- 
sition assigned to them by the Due de Bourgogne in his med- 
itated constitution of France, The more general inference is, 
that as the States- Greneral of the other provinces were in no 
essential respect superior to those of Burgundy, the duke's 
scheme rested altogether on a foundation of sand. 

To a certain extent I am not dis]X)sed to controvert or to 
doubt this conclusion. On the contrary, I think that M. Thomas 
has well explained why the provincial governments of France 
were impotent to control the central authority, and were, at 
the same time, indisposed to co-operate with it, and were not, 
in fact, elements out of which a system of order and of good 
government could have spontaneously arisen. 

But I am aware of no proof, nor of any argument to show, 
that the evils of these provincial constitutions were irremedi- 
able. I do not believe that the Due de Bourgogne meditated 
building on such foundations until they had undergone the im- 
provements which they both admitted and required. His pol- 
icy was at once to adhere to the ancient usages and landmarks, 
and to improve them ; and if he had lived, he would at least 
have attempted to meet the exigencies of "the great innova- 
tor, Time," by reformations, to be sanctioned and established 
by the people at large, both in the States of the various prov- 
inces, and in the States-Greneral of the kingdom at large. 

I gather, ■ however, from such acquaintance as I have with 
the modern literature of France, that M. Thomas expresses the 
general opinion of his contemporaries and fellow-countrymen 
in commending Louis XIV. for reducing the provincial States 
to utter insignificance, instead of assigning a place for them in 
any enlarged basis of his government. Louis at present enjoys 
the praise, such as it is, of having extinguished, one after an- 
other, all the institutions of France, which, if not so overthrown 
by him, might, it is said, have enabled his dynasty to wage a 



LOUIS XIV. 683 

successful war against the democratic usurpations of the eight- 
eenth century. He is extolled as a great innovator in his own 
despite, as having well fulfilled his high destiny of contribu- 
ting more than any other man to the preparation of that tabu- 
lar rasa, on which modern philosophy was to inscribe so long 
a series of constitutions, charters, and schemes of revolution- 
ary government. 

To myself it appears a mere prejudice to deny that France 
has derived from the subversion of her ancient monarchy sec- 
ular advantages so vast, that even the incalculable price which 
she has paid for them may not, perhaps, have been excessive. 
Louis XIA^. may be really entitled to the praise of having been 
the unconscious instrument of bringing those results to pass, 
but it is no very exalted commendation. Still less is it any 
good title to renown, if, as I believe, the motives by which he 
was guided were for the most part selfish, narrow, and con- 
tracted. Yet I would gladly, if possible, concur in the enthu- 
siasm which his name even yet excites in the land over which 
he reigned so long. Although there be no national prejudices 
predisposing us to such feelings, and though there be many 
such prejudices indisposing us to them, there is yet in the im- 
age which presents itself to us, as we read his own writings, 
the memoirs of his friends, and the eulogies of his admirers, 
something which it is impossible not to admire, something 
wliioh we must occasionally revere, and something which we 
must now and then even love. Yet, when ceasing to think of 
the man as he lived among his kindred and his friends, we 
estimate the king as he governed the people subject to his 
power, a far more unfavorable judgment on him seems to me 
inevitable. 

" L'Etat c'est moi" became at length no empty boast, but 
the arrogant avowal of a melancholy truth. In the lips of the 
sultan or of the sophy it would have been not only an exact, 
but a very reasonable epitome of the constitution of his des- 
potism. In those Oriental autocracies, the science of govern- 
ment is reducible to the stern alternative, that the ruler must 
either strike off the heads of those who resist his will, or for- 
feit his own head. But the system of the French monarchy 
was never thus terribly simple. It was most remote from such 
simplicity in the days of Louis XIV. It was, on the contrary, 



684 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF LOUIS XIV. 

a complex meclianism, of whicli each part was essential to the 
activity of the rest. It was a living body, the vitality of which 
consisted in the conservation and mutual support of all its in- 
tecrral members. To detach the crown from its alliance with 
the States- Greneral, with the Provincial States, with the Par- 
liament, the Municipalities, and the Magistracy, was to aim a 
suicidal blow at the crown itself. They were the buttresses 
of the throne, which could not long stand erect after their over- 
throw. They were the bulwarks of the third dynasty, which 
was evidently foredoomed to perish as the inevitable conse- 
quence of their fall. That ancient and venerable aristocracy 
of privilege, which, by attracting to itself the homage of the 
people, was enabled in its turn to render to the sovereign a yet 
more important homage, could not be degraded by him with- 
out inducing his own degradation. 

But pride and flattery blinded the eyes of Louis to these ob- 
vious and familiar truths. He would be the one power in the 
state, and presumptuously imagined that such independence 
and isolation might be at once practicable and enduring. He 
had the presumption to invite literature and commerce to take 
shelter beneath that solitary rule, not perceiving that he was 
thus about to nourish the infancy of powers which, in their 
maturity, must annihilate the protector beneath whose shadow 
they had grown up. He had the temerity to rule, as well as 
to reio-n, in his own person, not foreseeing that the responsi- 
bility thus mcurred must one day be fatal to the reverence, 
the admiration, and the terror which formed the real basis of 
his authority. But, above all, he forgot that no dominion can 
at once be hereditary and despotic ; that although he might 
transmit to his descendants his own extreme and unlimited 
rights, he could not transmit to them the talents or the fortune 
necessary to render such rights effectual ; and that, accordmg 
to the established laws of nature, an heir and successor to his 
crown must ere long appear, who would want the capacity to 
sustain that burdensome inheritance, and who yet v/ould be 
neither willing to abandon it, nor able with safety to attempt 
so hazardous a resignation. 



THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MONARCHIES, ETC. 685 



LECTURE XXIY. 

THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 

"How did it happen," asks Yoltaire, "that, setting out 
from the same point of departure, the governments of England 
and of France arrived, at nearly the same time, at results as 
dissimilar as the constitution of Yenice is unlike that of Mo- 



rocco 



?" 



The object of all my preceding lectures has heen to answer 
that question so far as it relates to France. To answer it 
fully, in relation to England, would require me to make a still 
larger demand on your time than I have already made. The 
subject is far too extensive to be discussed accurately, or even 
intelligibly, in any brief space, and yet it is too important to 
be altogether passed over in silence. I propose therefore, at 
present, merely to lay before you what I regard as the sub- 
stance of the answer to the problem which I have stated, re- 
serving for some future time the more complete exposition and 
defense of what I am about to offer. I must begin, however, 
by taking a very rapid retrospect of the ground which we have 
already traversed. 

It was long doubtful whether the empire of the Western 
world would belong to the Roman or to the G-allic people. If, 
in the result of the protracted struggle between them, those 
whom Rome called barbarians had triumphed, our poets would 
now have been writing " Lays of Ancient Graul," founded on 
a basis at once more romantic and more certain than the ex- 
isting legends of Livy ; for, while the inhabitants of the Seven 
Hills were engaged in an obscure warfare with the petty towns 
and villages of Central Italy, the people of G-aul were extend- 
ing their power over the western limits both of the Asiatic 
and of the European continents, and were leaving an indelible 
impression of their name and language from G-alatia to Gal- 
licia and Portugal — from Gralway to Gralloway and G-alles or 
"Wales, Of all the nations over whom triumphs had been eel- 



THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

ebrated at the Capitol, none had herself won so many con- 
quests, and none gave so large an accession of strength and 
glory to the all-conquering republic. 

Graul ceased to be a nation without becoming, in sentiment 
or in spirit, an integral member of the empire. Her civil in- 
stitutions no longer imparted security, honor, or advantage to 
the citizens. Her agriculture withered away under fiscal op- 
pression. Vast tracts of country were abandoned to barren- 
ness. Large parts of her territory were cultivated, not by 
freemen, but by slaves. Her ancient language gave place to 
that of her conquerors, and the melancholy triumphs of des- 
potism were incomplete only because the Church mitigated 
the calamities which even she was unable to avert, 

Gaul, therefore, fell an easy prey to her G-erman invaders. 
They settled in the south and in the east, to relieve rather 
than to augment her sufferings; but the barbarous Franks 
dispossessed the Gaulic proprietors of the north and of the 
west of a large part of the soil, and, to a great extent, even of 
their personal freedom. Though the long-haired Merovings 
ruled from the Ebro to the Meuse, and over the whole of West- 
ern Germany, it was a nominal rather than a real dominion 
— ^the ill-cemented alliance of a multitude of independent and 
half-savage chiefs, who, acknowledging the titular supremacy 
of the royal race, the supposed descendants of the gods, yield- 
ed them no effective obedience, nor any enduring attachment. 
The Merovingian kings discharged none of the essential attri- 
butes of sovereignty, but afforded the shelter of their name, 
and of their nominal power, to the growth of an aristocracy 
which, dividing among them the land and its inhabitants, pre- 
pared the way for the development of the feudal system. 

From the centre of that aristocracy emerged a family yet 
more distinguished by their hereditary genius than by their 
predominant authority. The third in succession of that lin- 
eage, Pepin le Bref, deprived the last of the Merovings of his 
titular crown. From Pepin it passed to Charlemagne — the 
most illustrious of all the founders of empire, if such glory be 
measured by the personal qualities of those by whom empire 
is acquired and maintained. For Charlemagne may be said 
to have been born prematurely, and to have belonged, by his 
character, by his tastes, and by his aspirations, to the eigh- 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 6S7 

teenth rather than to the eighth century. In the very depth 
of that night of ignorance ^yhich was interposed between the 
ancient and the modern civihzation of Europe, he emulated 
the profound policy of Augustus, and anticipated the soaring 
ambition of Napoleon. 

But when the powerful grasp of Charlemagne might no 
longer hold together the dominions which he had won, they 
were rapidly dissolved into their original elements. G-aul, or, 
as she was henceforth called, France, fhst shook off her de- 
pendence on the G-erman or foreign yoke, and then split into 
as many internal divisions as there were chieftains capable of 
exempting themselves from the control of the Carlovingian 
kings. A new territorial aristocracy divided the lands among 
them. Another family, destined, like that of Pepin, to be the 
founders of a new dynasty, arose in the midst of the conse- 
quent anarchical confusion. Robert the Strong transmitted to 
his descendants the duchy of France, until at length, in the 
person of Hugues Capet, they acquired the title of kings of 
the French people. 

It was at first, however, little more than a title. The feu- 
dal oligarchs were the real sovereigns of France. They be- 
came the founders of a polity of which, since then, the world 
has never ceased to feel the influence. The feudal system 
was a scheme of government which the subtle mtellect of the 
Normans first subjected to positive rules founded upon gener- 
al principles. It was a system derived from the combination 
of many concurrent elements, such as the patriarchal spirit of 
the old G-erman tribes — the territorial grants made by the 
leaders of the G-erman invasions to their military chieftains — 
the subdivision of those grants by them among their own fol- 
lowers — the conditions of military service on which all such 
grants were made, and the necessity which in that age con- 
strained every one either to seek protection as a client or to 
afford it as a patron. 

It was, however, an iron despotism. A feudal peer or baron 
of France was, within his own fief, not merely an absolute 
monarch, but a monarch invested with powers which, in ev- 
ery other form of government, have been regarded as incom- 
patible with each other. He could make war or peace with 
any other feudatory. He could make laws (with the consent 



688 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

of his chief vassals) for the government of his fief and of all 
persons sojourning within its limits. He was not subject to 
any law made without his own consent by the king or by any 
other law-givers. He was the supreme judge in all cases aris- 
ing within his fief, and over all the inhabitants of it. He 
might coin and issue money in his own name and at his own 
discretion. He was not liable to pay any tribute to the king, 
his suzerain, excepting only such dues as were imposed by the 
express conditions of the grant under which his feudal estate 
was holden. He was himself the suzerain of whom all his 
vassals held their lands. He was not only the lord of the free- 
men, but, to a great extent, the proprietor of the serfs living 
within his domain. 

I have already referred you to the works of Dr. Robertson, 
of Mr. Hallam, and of M. G-uizot, for an explanation of this 
singular scheme of government, whether considered as a body 
of laws, or as a system of national policy, or as a code of moral 
sentiments. From those great writers you will collect, that 
no dominion less stern, and no maxims less arbitrary, could 
have prepared mankind in the Middle Ages for the happier con- 
dition which awaited them in more civilized, though distant 
times. It formed the indispensable, though the terrible dis- 
cipline of generations which had been trained up in barbarism 
and in personal servitude. It was, therefore, destined to be a 
state of transition, and to be itself subverted by changes some- 
times abrupt, but more usually gradual and imperceptible. 
The history of France under the Capetian kings may be said 
to consist of the record of those changes. That history de- 
scribes the successive stages of the protracted contest which 
terminated first in the triumph of the successors of Hugues 
Capet over the feudal confederation, and then in the subver- 
sion of the feudal system, in all its principles and in all its de- 
tails, by the great revolutionary movements which marked the 
close of the eighteenth century. 

It has, therefore, been my object hitherto to consider each 
in order of the more considerable steps which led to this result, 
till the close of the reign of Louis XIV. With that view I at- 
tempted to explain how the enfranchisement of the communes, 
and the consequent growth of the municipal institutions of 
France, strengthened the royal power, and called into exist- 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 689 

ence the Tiers Etat as a counterpoise to the authority of the 
feudal aristocracy. I then considered how the Eastern cru- 
sades diminished the number of the feudal serfs and vassals 
— how they increased the strength and the number of the com- 
munes in which the feudal power had its natural and inveter- 
ate antagonists — how they tended to terminate the private 
wars by which the seigneurs asserted and maintained then* 
authority — ^how they contributed to restore the Roman law in 
France, and, therefore, to subvert the customs which formed 
the basis of the feudal dominion — how they promoted a change 
in the judicial institutions by which the seigneurs adminis- 
tered the law — how they were often fatal to the ancient rela- 
tions of the feudatories and the royal suzerains to each other 
— ^how they tended to impair the power of the feudal chiefs by 
changing the whole military system of Europe — ^how they gave 
to the kings of France a new militia in the great military and 
religious orders, and how, by promoting commerce and liter- 
ature, they nurtured the most deadly antagonists of the feudal 
despotism. 

I next pointed out how the Albigensian crusades, coinciding 
with the annexation to the crown of Normandy and Cham- 
pagne, brought within the limits of the royal authority the 
countries extending from the Alps to the Pyrenees, and de- 
pressed, in the same proportion, the power of the seignorial 
confederation. 

The assumption by St. Louis of a legislative authority, at 
first co-ordinate with, and then superior to, that of the seign- 
eurs of the royal domain, but which was ultimately destined 
to supersede the feudal right of legislation in all the fiefs of 
France, was the next subject of our inquiries. 

I then endeavored to show how the same monarch, by de- 
priving his barons of the right of private war and of trial by 
battle, laid the foundation of a new judicial system, by which 
the power, which they had so long exercised as judges in their 
respective fiefs, was gradually subverted. 

Such were the principal, though not the only causes to which 
I referred the triumph of the Capetian kings over the only body 
in the state which presented itself as a rival to their power. 
By means of that triumph they were enabled to acquire, or to 
assume, prerogatives so vast, as, in the result, to substitute a 

Xx 



690 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

royal for a feudal despotism. Yet in France, as in England, 
there were many influences tending to counteract and to repel 
this usurpation. There, as here, the privileged orders, nohle 
and sacerdotal, enjoyed great wealth, and still greater author- 
ity. The French, not less than the English, courts of justice 
were the natural guardians of the rights and franchises of all 
the people of the realm. The municipal corporations of that 
kingdom, as of our own, possessed the means of defending the 
national liberties. The representatives of the French people 
were elected on a more popular suffrage, and on a wider basis, 
•than the representatives of the people of England ; and, like 
them, were convened to assist their sovereigns with their ad- 
vice and with pecuniary gi'ants. The States-G-eneral claimed 
the power of the purse as distinctly as the House of Commons, 
and often maintained that power with equal firmness. The 
Calvmists of France were in no respect inferior to our own 
■Puritans in zeal for freedom of conscience, and, as its inevi- 
table result, for constitutional freedom ; and, in their active 
efforts to attain those blessings, they were unrivaled by their 
co-religionists in this country. And, finally, our national self- 
esteem will, I think, hardly persuade us that the pen was ever 
employed among our own ancestors by writers of more per- 
suasive eloquence, or of more enlarged and liberal minds, than 
the great authors who wielded that mighty instrument of 
power among our neighbors. I therefore attempted, at some 
length, to explain why neither the privileged orders, nor the 
judicial order, nor the municipalities, nor the States- Greneral, 
nor the Reformers, nor the men of letters of France, were able 
to stem the current which bore her forward to what Voltaire 
calls a resemblance to the government of Morocco. 

My last general object has been to show, by some few illus- 
trations, what that despotic authority really was, from the time 
when Henry IV. first acquired the undisputed possession of his 
thi-one, to the time when Louis XIV. conducted the govern- 
ment of France in person. If absolute power could ever be 
fitly confided to mortal man, where could nobler depositaries 
of that high trust have been found than in the succession of 
great men who filled up that mterval in the history of their 
country ? What ruler of mankind was ever gifted with a spir- 
it more genial, or with views more comprehensive, than those 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 691 

of Henry lY. ? or with an integrity and a patriotism more no- 
ble than that of Sully ? or with an energy of will superior to 
that of Richelieu ? or with subtlety more profound than that 
of Mazarin ? or with a zeal and activity surpassing that of Col- 
bert ? or with greater decision of character than Louvois ? or 
with a majesty transcending that of Louis XIV. ? And yet, 
what were the results of so much genius and intellectual pow- 
er when intrusted with political powers so vast and unrestrict- 
ed ? The favorable result was to add to the greatness of France, 
and to give birth to some undying traditions, pointing to her 
still more extensive aggrandizement. The unfavorable result^ 
were, to produce every possible variety of internal and of ex- 
ternal misgovernment — to promote wars more sanguinary than 
had ever before been waged between Christian nations— to pro- 
duce a waste of treasure so vast, that the simple truth seems 
fabulous — ^to excite a protracted civil war — ^to create artificial 
famines by absurd commercial restrictions in a country bless- 
ed beyond all other European states with a fertile soil and a 
genial climate — to kindle persecutions which altogether eclipse, 
in their enormity, those to which the early Christians were sub- 
jected by the emperors of Rome — ^to subject the territories of 
the bellio^erent nei2:hbors of France to desolations for a com- 
parison to which we must look back to the histories of the 
Huns and the Yandals — and to corrupt the moral sense of the 
people by the exhibition at the court of their sovereigns of a 
profligacy of manners resembling that of an Asiatic rather than 
that of a European monarchy. 

It would be easy, but it would hardly be useful, to enlarge 
the catalogue of the calamities in which France was involved 
by the absolute dominion to which her rulers had been con- 
ducted, first, by their conquest over their feudal antagonists, 
and then by the inability of the aristocratic, the judicial, the 
municipal, the representative, the religious, and the literary in- 
stitutions of the kingdom to balance and to restrain their pow- 
er. It is enough if we learn to regard such despotism with 
irreconcilable aversion, and to study with diligence, and to re- 
member with gratitude, the causes to which we are indebted 
for our own hereditary exemption from it. 

Such being the answer which I have already attempted to 
return to Yoltaire's question, so far as it relates to France, I 



692 TEE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

pass on to inquire what were the chief causes which, during 
the same period, conducted our own land to the possession of 
those constitutional franchises of which, at the present hour, 
we are still the undisputed inheritors ? It is not, I confess, 
without reluctance that I enter on topics at all times so trite 
and so familiar, and which, in very recent times, have been 
discussed by Mr, Hallam, and by M. Gruizot, and more espe- 
cially by Sir Francis Palgrave, with such a prodigality of learn- 
ing, and in so rich and measured a flow of judicial eloquence. 
Yet I may not forget that misgivings similar to these would 
obstruct no small part of all our academical studies ; that all 
elementary teaching must, to a great extent, be but the repe- 
tition of commonplaces ; that the history of our national liber- 
ties has for us an interest which may well be regarded as in- 
exhaustible ; that it has aspects almost as numerous, and as 
distinguishable from each other, as are the minds by which it 
is contemplated ; and that even they who are most unworthy 
to aspire to an equality or to a competition with the great au- 
thors I have mentioned, may at least illustrate and verify their 
conclusions, and may even venture occasionally to dispute and 
to correct them. 

While the Groths, the Burgundians, and the Franks were 
effecting the conquest and the occupation of G-aul, the Saxons 
were overrunning the whole of Grreat Britain south of the 
G-rampians. Their national name, at first confined to the in- 
habitants of the territories between the Elbe and the Eyder, 
progressively embraced all the tribes or peoples dwelling be- 
tween the Weser, the Ems, and the Rhine. It was not till the 
middle of the fifth century that they first appeared in force in 
this island ; but, within one hundred and fifty years from that 
time, they had founded here the eight kingdoms of Kent, Sus- 
sex, Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Bernecia, Deira, and Mer- 
cia. Grradually retreating before them, a large part of the 
British or Celtic natives of the soil took refuge in the western 
mountains, or, crossing the Channel, established themselves on 
the Armorican peninsula, which has ever since borne from them 
the name of Bretagne. 

The theory that the whole of the ancient British population 
' were driven by their conquerors either into Wales or into Bre- 
tagne, rests chiefly, if not exclusively, on the indisputable fact 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 693 

that, not long after the Conquest, the Celtic had been entu'ely 
superseded by the Grerman language ; for, with the exception 
of some few of the more prominent natural features of our 
country, such as our broader rivers and loftier mountains, the 
name of almost every object which meets the eye, from the 
G-rampians to the South Downs, from the Severn to the East- 
ern Ocean, is derived from the Saxon tongue. Here and there 
some local vestiges of the British, Roman, or Scandinavian 
nomenclatures perpetuate the memory of still earlier or still 
later vicissitudes of our national fortunes ; but our villages, 
our towns, our hundreds, and our counties — the animals which 
depasture our fields — the birds native to our climate — ^the in- 
digenous plants which we cultivate — the products of our mines 
— our common trades and mechanical arts — the utensils we 
employ in them — the members of our bodies — the ordinary 
actions of our lives, and whatever- is idiomatic, pungent, and 
forcible in our common speech, all bear their concurrent test- 
imony to the fact that we descend from those with whom the 
language of Saxony was once vernacular. With less distinct- 
ness, indeed, yet with no real doubt, our laws and our institu- 
tions attest the same genealogy. 

I reject, however, as altogether improbable and gratuitous, 
the hypothesis of the exile into Wales or Brittany of the whole 
of the native British population who escaped the sword of the 
Grerman conquerors. A large proportion of them were proba- 
bly included in that great body of slaves, prsedial and domes- 
tic, of whom we meet with such frequent mention in the an- 
nals of those times. That in that servitude they were tardily 
but effectually exterminated, will seem incredible to no one 
who is aware how, even in our own days, the aboriginal races 
in all newly-discovered territories waste away, and at length 
disappear in the presence of their more hardy, enterprising, 
and civilized invaders. Be this as it may, it is at least clear 
that, during twenty-five successive centuries, the lowlands of 
our island were chiefly peopled, and were exclusively govern- 
ed, by members of the great Teutonic family. In France, 
throughout the same period, there was a vast numerical pre- 
ponderance of the Grallic or Romano-Grallic over the Teutonic 
element of society. What was the effect of the slow and im- 
perfect fusion of the two races in that kingdom I have attempt. 



694 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

ed, in a former lecture, to explain. What was the effect of 
the undisturbed development of the Grerman habits of thought 
and action in our own land, it remains for us to inquire. 
• I have already avowed my belief, that to each of the nations 
of the earth belongs, by a divine decree, a distinctive charac- 
ter adapted to the peculiar office assigned to each in the great 
and comprehensive system of human affairs. Thus to France 
was appointed, by the Supreme Ruler of mankind, the duty 
of civilizing and humanizing the European world. To En- 
gland it has been given to guide all other states to excellence 
in the practical arts of life, to commercial wealth, to political 
wisdom, and to spiritual liberty. But to G-ermany was dele- 
gated the highest and the noblest trust which has been com- 
mitted to any people since the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the 
Romans fulfilled their respective commissions of imparting to 
our race the blessings of religion, of learning, and of law ; for 
in G-ermany we revere the prolific mother of nations, the re- 
former of a corrupted Christianity, and the conservator of the 
liberties and independence of the European commonwealth. 
Weakened as she has been in defensive, as well as in aggress- 
ive war, by the division of her territory into so many separate 
states, yet in that very weakness she has found her strength, 
in the unambitious but beneficent career which, by the pre- 
scient will of the Creator himself, she was destined to pursue. 
The fathers of some of the most aged among us witnessed her 
first assumption of her rank and proper station in the republic 
of letters ; and we ourselves are witnesses how, in that com- 
paratively new region of national prowess, she has exhibited 
the same indestructible character which, more than a thousand 
years ago, enabled her to lay in this island the basis of a gov- 
ernment, of which (if our posterity be true to their trust) anoth- 
er thousand years will scarcely witness the subversion. That 
England has her patrimony on the seas, France on the land, 
and Germany in the clouds, is a sarcasm at which a German 
may well afford to smile. For reverence in the contemplation 
of whatever is elevated, and imagination in the embellishment 
of whatever is beautiful, and tenderness in cherishmg wliatev- 
isr is lovely, and patience iii the pursuit of the most recondite 
truths, and courage in the avowal of every deliberate convic- 
tion, and charity in tolerating every form of honest dissent— 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 695 

these are now, as they have ever been, the vital elements of 
the Teutonic mind. They may, indeed, not seldom have given 
birth to an unmeaning mysticism, to visionary hopes, and to 
dangerous errors. Yet, from their remotest ancestry, the Grer- 
mans have received these gifts as their best and most enduring 
inheritance ; and, by the exercise and the influence of them, 
they impressed upon our own ancestral constitution much of 
that peculiar character which it retains to the present hour. 

"By the word Constitution," says Lord Bolingbroke, "we 
mean, whenever we speak with propriety and exactness, the 
assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs derived from 
certain fixed principles of reason, du'ected to certain fix:ed ob- 
jects of public good, that compose the general system by which 
the community hath agreed to be governed." Assuming the 
accuracy of this definition, I infer from it that we must seek 
the Constitution of any commonwealth, and, therefore, of our 
own, not in the organic structure of its government, but in the 
living spirit by which it is habitually animated ; not in a rigid 
analysis of the rights and the functions of the various orders 
of the citizens, so much as in the primaeval tendencies, the 
cherished habits, and the venerated maxims by which the na- 
tional polity has been molded and directed. I therefore pro- 
ceed to inquire, What are those principles of our English mon- 
archy which, having been first established by our Anglo-Saxon 
progenitors, have, from their age to our own, retained among 
us a perennial and an undisputed dominion ? 

First, then, whether we listen to the invectives of our neigh- 
bors, or to the taunts of some of the most eloquent, though not, 
I think, the wisest of our fellow-countrymen, we are required 
to condemn and to subvert those hereditary distinctions which 
elevate some, and depress the rest, of the ranks of society 
among us. Declining this, and all the other controversies of 
our age, I limit myself to the statement and the proof of the 
fact that an aristocracy of birth has ever been among the most 
active elements of our constitutional polity. 

The Anglo-Saxon people were divided into the five classes 
of kings, nobles, vavasours, ceorls, and slaves — ranks transmit- 
ted by inheritance from one generation to another, and which 
became the salient fountains of the whole body of our nation- 
al laws, of our most cherished rights, and of our most popular 
privileges. 



696 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

First in order in this political hierarchy was what, for want 
of a more appropriate word, may he called the Royal Caste. 
Over each of the component kingdoms of the Heptarchy, or, 
as it ought to be called, the Octarchy, reigned a monarch, who 
was designated sometimes as the Kyning and sometimes as the 
Ealderman. In the helief of his subjects, he was one of the . 
descendants of Odin or Woden, whose name, under various 
modifications, was revered from the shores of the Polar Sea to 
the eastern verge of the Caucasian Mountains. For that rea- 
son, the descent of the crown was strictly limited to the royal, 
or, rather, to the sacred line. Yet it was not invariably a lin- 
eal descent. The collateral was not seldom preferred to the 
direct heir — the brother, for example, to the son of the last 
Kyning. 

But in the persons of Athelstane and his successors the An- 
glo-Saxon realms were united into one confederation, though 
not incorporated into one kingdom. Over these confederate 
states reigned a sovereign, to whom his people gave the name 
of Brettwalda — that is, the wielder or ruler of Britain. Thus 
Athelstane was Brettwalda of the whole of Albion. The men 
of Kent and the men of Sussex were alike his subjects, but 
they were not fellow-citizens. He was not only the king of 
eight adjacent and rival states, but was also the mediator be- 
tween them. To maintain the principle and the permanency 
of this federal union, the powers of the Brettwalda over each 
member of it were, therefore, greater than the powers of any 
one of the E aldermen or Kynings in his own dominion, just 
(to use a very modern illustration) as the Congress of the 
United States has higher legislative functions, and as their 
Supreme Court has higher judicial functions throughout the 
whole republic than the Legislatures or than the tribunals of 
the component states possess within their several jurisdictions. 

Next in rank in the Anglo-Saxon commonwealth were the 
nobles, designated either as Earls or Thanes. That dignity, 
when combined with a certain extent and description of terri- 
torial property, carried with it high powers, both civil and mil- 
itary. Men of noble birth, when destitute of such property, 
were also destitute of any political power. But they had priv- 
ileges from which the inferior members of society were ex- 
cluded. Thus, even the monk in his cloister, and the priest 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 697 

in his cathedral (if of noble lineage), claimed and received the 
honors due to their descent. The word Vavasours, though of 
later origin, hest designates this part of the Anglo-Saxon so- 
ciety. 

To the nobles succeeded the Ceorls, or Commons of the realm. 
Though liable to many burdensome obligations, resulting from 
the relation in which they stood to theu' earls or lords, they 
were regarded by others and by themselves as freemen. They 
.corresponded to the class which we now call the Yeomanry, 
or to the Tiers Etat of France. 

All freemen, who were not themselves lords, were bound to 
live in subjection to some lord, to whom they swore fealty, and 
whose banner they followed in war. But the vavasour might 
choose his own lord, that is, he might attach, or, as it was 
called, commend himself to any lord who would accept his 
homage. The ceorl, on the other hand, was a tenant attached 
to a particular lordship, on which he was required to live, and 
where he was bound to render to his lord certain fixed services, 
either personal or pecuniary. Yet the ceorl had often a usu- 
fructuary title to some definite amount of land within the pre- 
cincts of the lordship. From that home he could not be eject- 
ed ; and if he possessed the means of purchasing a discharge 
from his adscription or attachment to the soil, the lord could 
not refuse so to enfranchise him. A ceorl, destitute of such 
a home, was compelled to find a master who would accept liim 
as a laborer and as an inmate in his household. 

These distinctions of rank among freemen were not, how- 
ever, indelible. A merchant who had thrice crossed the sea 
at his own expense obtained the dignity of a thane. A ceorl 
who could acquh-e, in his own right, five hydes of land, as- 
cended to the same rank. His descendants, in the third gener- 
ation, if retaining the land, were considered as vavasours, that 
is, as men of gentle blood and kindred, and as entitled to all 
the privileges of noble birth. 

Finally. The slave, who filled the lowest station in the 
Anglo-Saxon community, was res not persona, and as destitute 
of all political rights and franchises as the bullocks with whom 
he labored. Such having been the divisions of society among 
the Anglo-Saxons, I observe, 

Secondly, that in their age, as in our own, it was a princi- 



698 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

pie of the constitution of this kingdom, that the powers of the 
state should, as little as possible, be combined in a central 
government, and should, as much as possible, be distributed 
among the provincial or local authorities ; and that this rule 
was especially observed regarding the administration of justice. 
In all modern kingdoms sovereignty is territorial. In all 
the mediaeval kingdoms it was patriarchal. We consider all 
men as the subjects of Him who reigns over their settled place 
of abode. Our Grerman forefathers considered all men as sub- 
ject to the monarch of the tribe or confederacy within which 
they were born. After the tribe had become sedentary, they 
still gathered round their chieftain and acknowledged his do- 
minion. In this island his domain was called a town or town- 
ship, a word of which the Norman term manor has since taken 
the place. The chieftain was the proprietor of the whole of 
that domain. He was the actual possessor only of a part of 
it ; the rest was granted to his followers as tenants, either for 
their lives or for other terms, or was left as open fields or com- 
mons, of which the lord and his tenants had a kind of joint 
occupation. 

In each township the lord, with the concurrence of his ten- 
ants, held courts of justice, then called town-motes, which ex- 
ist among us at the present hour under the name of courts 
leet or courts baron. The conservation of the public peace 
was intrusted to the inhabitants of the township collectively. 
An officer, called the town-reeve, appointed by the lord, and 
four good and lawful men of the township, elected by the in- 
habitants, represented it at the folk-mote, or local assembly 
of the hundred. 

The court of the hundred, or folk-mote, was composed of 
all the lords and thanes whose townships were included within 
that district — of the town-reeve and four men already men- 
tioned, representing every such township — of the bishop of 
the diocese — and of an earl, who acted as the president of the 
assembly. The folk-mote was at once a court of justice (penal 
and civil) for the hundred, and a meeting for attesting and 
perpetuating the memory of a variety of acts, of which, in 
those days, no written record could be made. Such, for ex- 
ample, were the sale of lands, the payment for them, the en- 
franchisement of serfs, and the like. 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 699 

Next in the ascending scale of the local courts of the Anglo- 
Saxons were the shire-motes, or county courts. Our English 
counties have their origin from two sources. Some of them 
are ancient kingdoms reduced to the rank of provinces ; others 
are the dismemberments of such kingdoms. In either case 
the shire was placed under the authority of an earl. In each 
shire two shire-motes were holden annually. Sometimes those 
bodies acted as ecclesiastical synods, under the presidency of 
the hishop ; sometimes as secular courts, under the presidency 
of the earl, or of the shire-reeve, his deputy. The shire-mote 
was the grand inquest of the county. Every hundred was 
represented there by twelve men, and each township by the 
town-reeve and the four men already mentioned. It was the 
office of such attendants or representatives to present to the 
court the grievances of their respective hundreds or townships. 
It was the office of the court to take cognizance of all such 
grievances — of all crimes committed within the county — of 
all complaints of the abuse of power by any subordinate offi- 
cers — and of all appeals from the judgments of the township 
or the hundred courts. Such having been the distribution of 
political and of judicial powers in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, 
I observe. 

Thirdly, that in that, as in all subsequent ages, the Church 
of England and the realm of England were co-extensive ; that 
(in theory at least) each embraced, within its appropriate sphere, 
all the people of England ; and that the ecclesiastical and civil 
states were intimately allied or united to each other. So inti- 
mate, indeed, was that union, that each kingdom of the Oc- 
tarchy constituted a distinct diocese, and every such diocese 
was considered as a single parish, of which the bishop was the 
incumbent. By him presbyters were appointed to officiate in 
the various districts, civic or rural ; and by him the annual 
revenues of the see were appropriated, first, for the maintenance 
of divine service ; then for the relief of the poor ; and, finally, 
for the support of the clergy. The clerks and the laymen then 
lived under the same code, civil and penal ; and, though the 
exposition of the faith was considered as the peculiar province 
of synods, the regulation and enforcement of ecclesiastical dis- 
cipline belonged to the temporal Legislature and tribunals. 
The king was the patron of all vacant bishoprics, and granted 



700 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

them, by royal writs or charters, without either the previous 
concurrence of the clergy, or the subsequent sanction of the 
pope. If the State thus encroached on the province of the 
Church, the Church, in turn, assumed some of the functions 
of the temporal government. The clerical order in those times 
were in the exclusive possession of the art of writing, and, 
therefore, of many of the higher secular offices. As by them 
all royal charters were prepared and transcribed, so they were 
the keepers or depositaries of them. To the clergy, also, it thus 
belonged to devise and issue those royal mandates or writs, 
which then, as now, were the foundation of all civil actions. 
Hence arose the Chancery, or Officina Brevium ; and hence, 
also, was chiefly derived that peculiarity of the English judicial 
system, the jurisdiction of a judge of equity, whose province 
it is to supply the defects and to mitigate the rigor of the or- 
dinary administration of justice. 

Fourthly. I observe that, from the era of our earliest An- 
glo-Saxon records, England has never acknowledged any other 
than a monarchical government. In the Anglo-Saxon king, or 
Brettwalda, resided in theory (if not in fact) all the powers of 
the state, and from him flowed, or were supposed to flow, all 
offices and dignities subordinate to his own. 

Thus he was in all causes the great and the ultimate judge. 
As the supreme lord or suzerain of the realm, all his thanes 
were amenable to his judicial authority. As commander-in- 
chief of the military forces of the state, all offenses committed 
sub vexillcL came within his cognizance. As sovereign of all 
the denizens of his kingdom, he punished all offenses accom- 
panied by violence or rapine ; remedied the defects of the law 
which he administered ; supplied the omissions of it when it 
was silent ; infused energy into the administration of it when 
it was feeble ; and mitigated the severity of it when it was 
oppressive or burdensome. As judge of appeal, he afforded re- 
dress to any suitor who had sought it in vain in the hundred 
or county courts. As owner of the four great roads which 
traversed the island from east to west and from north to south, 
he had a special care of all who traveled along them ; and 
crimes committed on the king's highway thus came to be re- 
garded as falling especially within the jurisdiction of the king. 

His presence, his vicinity, or his express grant, carried with 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 701 

it a special protection, wliich was called the king's peace. It 
was a privilege which always prevailed throughout a circle of 
which his mansion was the centre, and of which, for some 
mystic reason, the radius measured three miles, added to three 
furlongs, three acre breadths, nine feet, nine palms, and three 
barley-corns. 

On his coronation, and at the three great festivals of the 
Church, the king's peace was extended throughout the whole 
realm. All violations of it were considered as injuries to the 
king himself, and rendered the transgressor amenable imme- 
diately to his penal jurisdiction. 

The judicial powers thus vested in the Brettwalda were ex- 
ercised by him in person. Thus Edgar made two judicial cir- 
cuits in each year, and Canute appears to have observed the 
same practice. Such royal visitations were, indeed, indispens- 
able at a time when each of the component states, or the king- 
dom of Britain, still retained laws and customs peculiar to it- 
self, and was under the rule of earls or viceroys, whose abuse 
of power could be arrested by no other means. 

But the Anglo-Saxon king or Brettwalda had many other 
than these judicial prerogatives. He was the patron of all the 
dignities and offices of his government, appointing, and at his 
pleasure displacing, the aldermen, earls, thanes, sheriffs, heret- 
archs, and all other great functionaries, civil or military. 

He was in possession of large revenues. His royal domains 
were nearly equal to the domains of all his principal chieftains 
combined together. He received customs at every sea-port, 
and tolls in all open markets. He was entitled to money pay- 
ments from every incorporated city or borough, in commuta- 
tion of the services due to him from the citizens. Heriots were 
rendered to him on the death of all of his thanes, and to him 
were paid the forfeitures imposed on offenders in various cases 
of conviction from crimes. 

But his highest prerogative was that of legislation, which, 
however, he exercised in concurrence with the wittenage-raote. 
For, 

Fifthly, I observe that, even in that remote age, England 
was never destitute of assemblies, meeting under the presi- 
dency of the King of England, for the enactment and promul- 
gation of laws. 



702 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

Each of the component kingdoms of th.e Anglo-Saxon mon- 
archy had a separate wittenage-mote, or Council of the "Wise. 
Probably this may in each have been but another name for the 
shire-mote, or County Court, already mentioned. But concur- 
rently with them the Brettwalda, or King of Britain, held a 
general wittenage-mote, or Diet of the kingdom at large. At 
every such assembly he presented himself to his subjects in all 
the splendor of royalty. There also appeared all the prelates 
of the realm, the ealdermen, the earls, and the thanes, of each 
of the states, or minor kingdoms, or shires, over which he was 
supreme ; and all the high officers of his government, both lay 
and clerical. In this supreme wittenage-mote laws were en- 
acted in the name of the Brettwalda. In terms, at least, the 
authority of them was co-extensive with the limits of his do- 
minions. But, in fact, the acceptance of such laws, by what 
may be called the local or inferior Legislatures, was essential 
to their validity within the precincts of each. Thus we learn 
that the laws of Edgar were long rejected in Mercia, those of 
Athelstane in Kent, and those of Canute in Northumberland. 

But the w^ittenage-mote was not merely a Legislature. They 
constituted, also, a court of criminal jurisdiction, and especially 
in cases in which an accusation, or, as we should now say, an 
impeachment, was preferred against any ealderman or earl, or 
against any thane, who was an immediate vassal of the crown. 

The wittenage-mote possessed, also, much of the character 
of a congress of independent powers, in which those whom we 
should describe as the great vassals of the crown deliberated 
on all questions affecting their respective states or communi- 
ties, and entered into compacts for raising money, or for the 
adoption of other measures required by the exigencies of the 
whole Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. 

Mr. Sharon Turner has labored to prove that the wittenage- 
mote included members holding neither office nor dignity, but 
who appeared there as representatives of the absent vassals or 
citizens. He is contradicted, on what appear to me conclusive 
grounds, by authorities more recent, and, indeed, much higher 
than his own, and especially by Dr. Lingard and by Sir Francis 
Palgrave. It must, indeed, be confessed, that all inquiries into 
the composition, the rights, the powers, and the modes of proce- 
dure of this great assembly, are involved in an obscurity which 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 703 

the most profound research, the ripest learning, and the keen- 
est subtlety of our most eminent antiquarians have not heen 
able altogether to dispel. Yet no fact can be more exempt 
from reasonable doubt than that, during nearly two centuries 
before the Norman Conquest, a national assembly, comprising 
such dignitaries, and habitually exercising such functions as 
1 have mentioned, formed, under the Anglo-Saxon kings, one 
great element of our national government and Constitution. 

Such were the main fundamental principles of the Anglo- 
Saxon Constitution — principles which may, with ease, be dog- 
matically stated, but which can hardly be understood aright 
except as they are illustrated by the laws, the arts, the man- 
ners, and the literature of the Anglo-Saxon people. What 
these were may be learned from Mr. Sharon Turner, of whom 
M. Gruizot says that he has diligently collected an abundance 
of facts, but possesses few ideas. If that censure were better 
founded than it really is, it would not, perhaps, derogate much 
from the esteem in which that wise and amiable writer is held 
by us, his fellow-countrymen ; for we are accustomed to think 
that history and philosophy have each then* own appropriate 
spheres ; that each should inform and be infused into the oth- 
er, not confounded with it ; and that a complete, luminous, 
and accurate narrative of events may reasonably be preferred 
by a historian to the most subtle explication of their connect- 
ing principles. 

If Mr. Sharon Turner's speculative wisdom be not very re- 
dundant, it is at least copious enough to establish the fact that 
Teutonic ideas and Teutonic habits were planted by the Sax- 
ons in England, as they had been by the Groths, the Burgundi- 
ans, and the Franks m France. But the growth of those ideas 
and habits was more active here than there, and the develop- 
ment of them far more complete ; for, in this island, the Ger- 
man race, alloyed by no foreign admixture (the Danes were 
but another branch of the great Saxon family), had, long be- 
fore the Norman invasion, impressed upon our people a char- 
acter at once peculiar, indigenous, and indestructible. From 
them our fathers' fathers mherited, and have transmitted to 
our own generation, a body of opinions, of maxims, and of 
moral s';ntiments, in which may be found for then- polity and 
for our polity a common root, and origin, and lineage. That 



704 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

their Brettwalda and our Q,ueen — their earls, and thanes, and 
our nobility — their shire-motes and our Circuit Courts — their 
wittenage-mote and our Parliament, were so many constituted 
authorities, identical in all things except in the epochs in which 
they flourished and in the names by which they were desig- 
nated, is, indeed, only one of those pleasant dreams which 
haunt and animate the antiquarian as he treads his dry and 
dusty path. But that, under the widest diversities of forms, 
there is yet much real sameness of substance between the in- 
stitutions of England as they formerly existed in the ninth, 
and as they actually exist in the nineteenth century, is a fact 
susceptible of the clearest proof, and replete with the deepest 
interest. Nor is the cause of this unbroken continuity doubt- 
ful or obscure. Beyond all Western nations, the G-ermans pos- 
sess that immutability of character and of habits by which the 
Oriental races are distinguished ; but with the difference that, 
in the East, an abject superstition and an inert passiveness — 
in Germany, a solemn imagination — ^has ever attached the 
living to the dead, and to those who are yet to live. Serious, 
dutiful, and meditative, they inhabited this island a thousand 
years ago, as they inhabit their own father-land now, in pa- 
triarchal thoughtfulness, dwelling less in the passing hour than 
in the generations which are yet to come, and in the genera- 
tions which have long since passed away. I will attempt, in 
the fewest possible words, to show how great is the conformity 
between the living spuit of the institutions which they created, 
and to which I hav^ already referred, and that of the institu- 
tions under which we actually live. 

1st, then, that wide inequality between the different ranks 
and orders of our people which distinguishes our nation at the 
present day, has been characteristic of it since the days of Ed- 
gar and of Athelstane. The aristocratic spirit has at all times 
pervaded and animated the English commonwealth, but not 
the aristocracy of birth alone. In the times of the Brettwal- 
das, successful merit might rise to the privileges of noble de- 
scent as freely as in those of Elizabeth or of Yictoria. Polit- 
ical power was, indeed, never dissociated from property. The 
law which exacts from every member of the House of Com- 
mons a certain proprietary qualification in land, is but the re- 
publication, in a new form, of a law which was in force at the 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 705 

shire-motes and at the wittenage-motes of our remote progen- 
itors ; for to them it was known by a natural sagacity, as it 
is known to us by a wider experience, that power and proper- 
ty, if not bound together in a strict alliance, will be arrayed 
against each other in a deadly hostility. Yet power in the 
state, and the advantages which such power conveys, have 
never been confined to a single caste among us. It was the 
policy which our Saxon ancestors have transmitted to ourselves, 
to render su6h honors a prize for which all might contend, not 
an exclusive enjoyment in which a few might luxuriate. They 
aimed at an equality of rights, not at an equality of conditions. 
They sought to combine all ranks of free men into one body ; 
not by depressing the noble to the level of the ignoble, but by 
enabling all men to acquire, by desert and industry, the bene- 
fits denied to them by fortune and by parentage. An untu- 
tored wisdom taught them that this is the one true and secure 
equality — the only structure of the social system by which the 
highest social qualities can be permanently called into exercise 
for the general good — ^the single polity which affords an ade- 
quate scope for dutifulness, for energy, and for hope in those 
who aspire to rise ; for vigilance, for self-improvement, for con- 
descension, and for sympathy in those who have inherited firom 
their fathers a position on the high places of the earth. 

2. "With the exception of the years which elapsed between 
the death of the first and the restoration of the second Charles, 
England has, during more than a thousand years, been under 
the rule of hereditary monarchs, who, either in fact or in the- 
ory, have wielded all the powers and dispensed all the honors 
of the state. The prerogatives which our present sovereign 
exercises, through the agency of responsible advisers, are her 
inheritance from the Brettwaldas, who, as we have seen, exer- 
cised them in their own persons. If, at this day, fleets and 
armies are raised and commanded in the royal name — if all 
property, dedicated to public uses, is now vested in the crown 
— if every stage of every suit or action is conducted by the 
queen's judicial officers, in obedience to the queen's writs or 
mandates — if, by her alone, war can be made and peace re- 
stored — if all treaties with foreign powers be concluded only 
in her name — if, at her pleasure and under her great seal, all 
patents of nobility and all grants of the higher offices of the 

Yy 



706 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

state are issued — if, by lier, the Legislature is summoned, pro- 
rogued, and dissolved — and if all our laws are enacted, not lay 
the three estates of the realm, hut hy her majesty, with the 
advice and consent of those estates assembled in Parliament, 
all these rights or usages form a part of the patrimony of the 
English crown, which has descended upon her who wears it 
now, through each of the six dynasties by whom successively 
it has been worn. Such usages are, indeed, derided as so many 
obsolete legal fictions by certain scoffers among us, who un- 
ceremoniously, if not irreverently, consign all such fictions to 
the limbo of imposture and of cant, or, in more fashionable 
phrase, of shams. Those monsters of the modern imagination 
have, it must be confessed, achieved great triumphs, but per- 
haps none so great as their entire subjugation of the very 
writers who have thus most loudly proclaimed war against 
them, seeing that they are themselves, of all men, the most 
helpless slaves of cant, if thereby be meant the habitual sub- 
stitution of certain favorite phrases for real and definite mean- 
ings. Wiser, though less witty men, will regard these fictions 
of our Constitution as among its most sacred and invaluable 
elements. They survive, not as so many vain traditions of 
worn-out principles — not as the empty shadows of departed 
realities — but as the grave, though cautious expression of liv- 
ing truths. They are a homage rendered to hoar antiquity, 
indeed, but rendered also to prerogatives which, though dor- 
mant, are not extinct. They are the records of exigencies 
which have arisen, and of exigencies which may yet arise, 
when, for the conservation of society at large, the prerogatives 
of the English crown may be called into exercise in all their 
primseval force and in all their still inherent vitality. In the 
mean time, the theory which recognizes and does homage to 
these dorm.ant prerogatives is not, in truth (as our facetious 
satirists imagine), merely fictitious. All who have studied the 
government of our land, not in books merely, or in magazines 
and newspapers, but from a close personal observation of it, 
will attest, that the personal powers of the sovereign of En- 
gland in the nineteenth century, tempered as they are by the 
comities of our age, and modified as they are by the forms in 
use among us, are yet powers not nominal, but real ; arduous 
enough to exercise the highest intellect, and large enough to 
satisfy the aspirations of the most ardent beneficence. 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 707 

3. The monarchy of the ancient Brettwalda, as of our mod- 
ern King, was a limited monarchy. From the days of Alfred 
and of Athelstane to these days, our sovereigns have reigned 
(every lover of our national liberties, if wise, will acknowledge 
that they have reigned) by divme right. There is a deep and 
a generous philosophy, as well as a more than human wisdom, 
in the apostolic canon, that "the powers which he are ordained 
of G-od" — the powers symbolized, whether by the staff of the 
constable or by the crown of the monarch. The servile max- 
ims for which that doctrine has been made the pretext are not 
legitimate deductions from it. They proceed on a total mis- 
apprehension of its real meaning. That meaning is, that all 
human power is indissolubly connected with a correspond- 
ing responsibility both to Grod as its author, and to man as 
the subject of it. In this spirit it was that, long before and 
long after the Norman Conquest, the coronation of our kings 
was regarded, not as an empty pageant, but as an act strictly 
essential to the assumption and use of their royal authority ; 
for at that solemn ceremony a sacramental unction was (at 
least) supposed to impart to the English king a sacerdotal 
character, as the vicegerent among men of the King of kings. 
That sacred chrism rendered him, at least in popular belief, 
the anointed of the Lord ; but it also rendered him, in popu- 
lar belief, and often in his own, amenable to those inevitable 
penalties which the Supreme Ruler of the world would inflict, 
or would sanction, if the king should violate the oath which 
he then took before his assemibled people to govern them in 
justice and in mercy. 

4. But the limitation of the power of our kings, from the 
earliest to the latest times, has rested on a surer sanction than 
any oath, however solemn. To repeat what I have already 
had occasion to say on that subject in a preceding lecture, 
" Our land has ever lived under the dominion of law. By 
that power the physical force of the many, the formidable in- 
fluence of the few, and the arbitrary will of the monarch, have 
ever been controlled with more or less of energy and of suc- 
cess. This dominion of the law was exercised in the time of 
our Saxon progenitors in the folk-motes, the shire-motes, and 
the wittenage-motes ; in our own times, in our courts of jus- 
tice, and in our high court of Parliament. During more than 



708 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 

a thousand years, our legal tribunals have been interposed be- 
tween the various orders of the state, to vindicate the rights, 
and to arrest the encroachments of them all. Throughout that 
long course of ages, those legal sanctuaries have been at once 
the bulwarks of order and the strong-holds of liberty in En- 
gland ,' and to them it is to be ascribed that the English Par- 
liaments have never fallen, as the Cortes of Spain fell, or as 
the States-G-eneral of France silently disappeared." 

5. Since the age when England was governed by the house 
of Cerdic to the age in which the sceptre passed to the house 
of Brunswick, there has never been a period in which the pow- 
ers of the English crown have not been divided, balanced, and 
controlled by the co-ordinate powers of the English Legisla- 
ture. No sovereign has ever sat on the throne of this realm 
except in virtue of a title created by some preceding enact- 
ment, or sanctioned by some subsequent recognition of the na- 
tional Legislature. No such sovereign has ever established a 
right to inscribe among our laws edicts promulgated in the 
exercise of his own unaided prerogative. There never was a 
time when the law-givers of our land were not armed with 
privileges, judicial and administrative, for their safeguard in 
the free discharge of that pre-eminent franchise. 

There is, indeed, a loose and popular impression, that the 
Norman Conquest swept away all the institutions of the An- 
glo-Saxons, and among them the wittenage-mote, substituting 
no other legislative body in its place. It is easy to detect the 
causes of that belief. In no other European history do we 
meet with any conquest which effected so complete, so abrupt, 
and so lasting a change in the state and fortunes of the con- 
quered people. It has even become the era of our insular 
chronology ; and, for reasons which I can not now pause to 
explain, has gone far to obliterate the memory and the records 
of our earlier political constitution. Yet no fact admits of 
readier or of more complete proof than that all the most im- 
portant of the legal customs, and legal principles, and national 
sentiments of England beneath her Brettwaldas, were yet in 
force in England beneath William the Norman and his de- 
scendants to the fourth generation. New nar .«s, Norman or 
Latin, were indeed, in many cases, substituted for the Saxon 
titles. Thus to the wittenase-mote succeeded the cwia reffis. 



ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 709 

But the two were really identical, though nominally distinct. 
For the most complete and triumphant proof of that fact, I 
would refer to a dissertation (obviously from the pen of the 
very learned Sir Francis Palgrave) which is to he found in the 
sixty-ninth number of the Edinburgh Review. It will enable 
any student to satisfy himself that the Parliament in which 
we and our forefathers have so long and so justly gloried, may 
be traced, through a long but unbroken genealogy, back to the 
Saxon assemblies which hailed the Confessor, and Canute, and 
Edgar as their kings. 

For the history of our commonwealth from the earliest epoch 
to our own is that of a people looking before and after, whose 
retrospect is unwearied, that their progress may be at once 
constant and secure. Amid all the errors, and all the crimes, 
and all the miseries which have disgraced and burdened our 
land, it has ever cherished reverence for the traditions, for the 
achievements, for the struggles, and for the sufferings of pre- 
ceding generations — reverence for the church in which they 
w^orshiped, for the crown which they honored, for the tribunals 
which they obeyed, and for the Legislature which, at much 
cost of blood, and toil, and treasure, they perpetuated — rever- 
ence for the laws which they transmitted as a patrimony to 
their descendants — and reverence for the liberties which they 
bequeathed as a birthiight to ourselves. Nor has our land ever 
yet been wanting in hope — in a hope sustained by an unfalter- 
ing faith in the expansive power of those great principles, of 
which the truth has been tried by the severest tests, and has 
been proved alike in our good and in our evil fortunes. To 
improve, not to subvert — to adapt our institutions to the suc- 
cessive exigencies to which Time has given birth — to encoun- 
ter and subdue evils real and remediable, not evils imaginary 
or inherent in the indestructible conditions of all human so- 
ciety — to abandon to the schools all Utopian reveries — to re- 
gard the constitution of the realm, not as the absolute proper- 
ty of any one generation of men, but as a sacred trust for 
which each generation is in turn responsible — such (except 
during the Cromwellian usurpation) have been the invariable 
maxims of tht English monarchy during a period exceeding 
that which intervened between the foundation and the extinc- 
tion of the power of Rome. 



710 THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MONARCHIES, ETC. 

To the question of Voltaire then, "Why has England so long 
and so successfully maintained her free government and her 
free institutions ? I answer, because England is still, as she 
I has always been, Grerman ; because her national franchises are 
the spontaneous and legitimate fruit of her national character ; 
of that character, dutiful, serious, persevering, reverential, and 
hopeful, which has been transmitted to us from our Anglo- 
Saxon ancestors, and which it now remains for us to transmit 
to our remotest descendants. 

Far different from this is the answer returned by M. G-uizot 
in his " Essai des Causes de I'Etablissement du Grouvernement 
Representatif en Angleterre." The powers of that great writer 
were never exhibited with greater felicity than in that remark- 
able treatise, in wliioh he traces the liberties of England to the 
relative positions into which the Conquest brought the Norman 
people and government on the one hand, and the Saxon people 
and nobles on the other hand. Luminous and comprehensive 
as is that commentary on our annals, I think it essentially de- 
fective, for the reasons which I have already mentioned ; and 
even inaccurate, for reasons which the time at my command 
will not now allow me to mention. Yet to any one who wishes 
to pursue the inquiry which I proposed at the outset of this 
lecture, it would be impossible to recommend any guide who 
could be followed with greater confidence, with more advant- 
age, or with equal pleasure. 

Here, then, I close the Lectures which it will be in my 
power to address to you on the History of France during the 
.present academical term. If the necessary time and opportu- 
nity shall be allowed to me, I hope, in a future term, to com- 
plete them by a review of the Causes of the Decline and Fall 
of the French Monarchy at the Revolution of 1789. 



THE END. 



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